Naomi Klein's excellent Doppelganger which is a difficult book to categorise: part memoir, part social commentary, it explores the idea of doubles. Klein is often mistaken for another famous and outspoken Naomi: Naomi Wolf. What starts as a frustrating, if amusing, conflation turns into a years-long obsession for Klein that forms part of the thesis of the book. Wolf, once a lauded liberal feminist devolves into anti-vaxx, conspiratorial thinking. Once a darling of the Democrats, she now rubs shoulders with the most extreme of the American right such as Steve Bannon.

But this isn't about Wolf (or Other Naomi as Klein posts) or even wholly about Klein. It's a book about us. About our culture, our society and systems. There is a twoness built in, a Shadow Land that has been revealed to us through the pandemic. It is a mirror of truth as well as a distortion, but it is a reflection first: this our doppelgänger culture.

While I loved the exploration of contemporary culture, the fearmongering, the conspiracy, and more, this book hangs a lot looser than previous endeavours. I believe we are seeing an evolution in Klein's writing. The tightly-wound journalistic rigour of previous books like The Shock Doctrine have fallen away into a more conversational tone. This isn't a criticism per se as readability should be lauded. But what I mean I think is it represents an evolution of Klein's style that focuses more on accessibility and putting things in human terms as opposed to the logically consistent, dense, and scholarly; she must rather relates the themes of the books to pop culture. I lost count at how many film and book references Klein makes. And it's great! What I'm getting at is a marrying of her two sides: the journalistic rigour with the cultural consumer and distiller. I would have loved a deeper exploration of our doppelgänger culture. We have had those ideas touched on by writers like Fanon and Du Bois but not so much in modernity. Perhaps that's the rub: it's much harder to write through that when it's still happening. We won't know all the ways in which conspiracy will affect our culture for many years yet. Still, dialling into the core concepts a but more would have helped this b0ok. No Is Not Enough, Klein's previous work, eschewed her older style for this newer one. My hope is a reconcilliation of these two styles on a new topic in, er, probably another 7 years.

What a damn interesting ride. I read the first part physically from the library and the rest on audio after failing to structure my time accordingly. I'll be re-reading this in the future. Who knows if I'll feel the same next time.