DOPPELGANGER: A Trip Into the Mirror World, by Naomi Klein. Read by the author.
“The uncanniness provoked by doppelgängers is particularly acute because the thing that becomes unfamiliar is you,” Naomi Klein says in “Doppelganger,” an elegant hybrid of memoir and social science that traces the motif of the double throughout history, popular culture and Klein’s own personal life.
Sick of being confused on social media with the ’90s feminist turned conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, Klein uses her own (justified) exasperation to peer at the black-and-white divisions of almost every aspect of contemporary life: the economic inequality laid even more bare by the sacrifice of essential workers to save the wealthy from Covid-19; Israel and “its partitioned shadow land,” Palestine; the stigma of autism and the parents who would deny their children lifesaving vaccines to avoid it; fitness influencers who condemn “less healthy” bodies for their susceptibility to disease. In short, “the fascist clown state that is the ever-present twin of liberal Western democracies, perpetually threatening to engulf us in its fires of selective belonging and ferocious despising.”
Rather than alienating the “other side,” as it were, Klein uses the doppelgänger rubric as a way of pulling the unfamiliar closer, seeking out thoughtful and thorough context for how seemingly irreconcilable factions arrived at their extremes. “This is the trouble with the Mirror World,” she says, her tone very the-call-is-coming-from-inside-the-house: “There is always some truth mixed in with the lies.”
DOPPELGANGER: A Trip Into the Mirror World | By Naomi Klein | Read by the author | Macmillan Audio | 14 hours, 47 minutes
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