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lee_foust 's review for:
Doppelgänger
by Daša Drndić
Much of the time I was reading Doppelganger I was questioning the aptness of mashing the two separate texts of which it's made together--at least until the ending of the second, much longer text, "Pupi," made it all clear. Bear with it, there is a connecting theme to the two texts and that connection is key to understanding what the novel as a whole is all about. And, while I'm not sure that the first section, "Artur and Isabella," was entirely necessary, I felt a wonderful sense of completeness and appropriateness when I came to the novel's beautifully written final scene. I demur to explicitly state the thematic link and to discuss it because it should be obvious to readers when they get there and such a description would work as a spoiler to someone who's yet to read the novel, so I'm just going to say that it's satisfying and well worth your time and leave it at that.
Reading through the reviews here I was surprised to see that several readers couldn't make it through "Pupi." This is a real shame since the novel kind of unfolds its raison d'etre in this section's denouement. I believe that the inability on some people's parts to read this second section is to the text's credit rather than detriment, however. Having a fairly close bipolar friend, I realized fairly early on in this second section that this disorder was being represented in a novel linguistic way in "Pupi." I can understand being impatient with the staccato diction and the constant use of non-sequitur, the text's repetitions and constant jumping around between random incongruities and life-or-death essentials, but I believe this was the novel's attempt to capture the kind of disassociation of a mind running too fast to plod through the kind of everyday reality to which most of us are able to ascribe. The artistic frisson of this technique, running through discussions of Althusser and Foucault, their lives and philosophies, in oversimplified sentences and constant self-derailed tangents of thought, was, in my opinion, a brilliant way to represent the cognitive storm of the condition--more an overload than a deficiency of thought, a form of self-defeating genius rather than a mental retardation or slowness as we used to say.
Perhaps because of having some small inkling of this because of my friend, I felt deeply for this character that so many here felt compelled to push away and abandon. Which is exactly how the world deals with brains that work differently, and this is another theme of Doppelganger, and is depicted in the text itself as Pupi's alienation grows and his mind spins ever faster around itself and away from the concreteness of our collective sense of objective reality. That's pretty remarkable: that the situation depicted in the novel becomes a perfect mirror reflecting the experience of being able to read it--or not.
Reading through the reviews here I was surprised to see that several readers couldn't make it through "Pupi." This is a real shame since the novel kind of unfolds its raison d'etre in this section's denouement. I believe that the inability on some people's parts to read this second section is to the text's credit rather than detriment, however. Having a fairly close bipolar friend, I realized fairly early on in this second section that this disorder was being represented in a novel linguistic way in "Pupi." I can understand being impatient with the staccato diction and the constant use of non-sequitur, the text's repetitions and constant jumping around between random incongruities and life-or-death essentials, but I believe this was the novel's attempt to capture the kind of disassociation of a mind running too fast to plod through the kind of everyday reality to which most of us are able to ascribe. The artistic frisson of this technique, running through discussions of Althusser and Foucault, their lives and philosophies, in oversimplified sentences and constant self-derailed tangents of thought, was, in my opinion, a brilliant way to represent the cognitive storm of the condition--more an overload than a deficiency of thought, a form of self-defeating genius rather than a mental retardation or slowness as we used to say.
Perhaps because of having some small inkling of this because of my friend, I felt deeply for this character that so many here felt compelled to push away and abandon. Which is exactly how the world deals with brains that work differently, and this is another theme of Doppelganger, and is depicted in the text itself as Pupi's alienation grows and his mind spins ever faster around itself and away from the concreteness of our collective sense of objective reality. That's pretty remarkable: that the situation depicted in the novel becomes a perfect mirror reflecting the experience of being able to read it--or not.