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A review by amber_lea84
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
3.0
So this is a memoir about how Naomi Klein has continuously been mistaken for Naomi Wolf. When I found out about it the first thing I did was google which was which, because despite the fact that I've read both of their books I still can't keep them straight. So obviously I had to read this.
But this isn't just a book about the struggle of being confused with someone else. Naomi uses this to talk more broadly about polarization and the way the right grotesquely mimics the left and the strange way the far left has been absorbed into the far right (ie antivaxxers, fitness gurus, etc.) Sometimes this extrapolation works really well and sometimes it's a bit of a stretch. I mean, at it's core, Naomi just wanted to write a book about other Naomi. And honestly, that's the book I wanted to read. But I get that she wanted to make it something more so as to not seem totally obsessed with something that probably only seemed to matter to her.
Weirdly at one point near the end she asserts that it's racist of people to confuse the two of them (because apparently they're both Jewish), which was so off-base. Like dude, why would you go there? It's like she forgot for a second that it's not just the far right who get confused, but everyone? Because we're talking about two women named Naomi who write very similar things. And not everyone even knows what they look like? But she obviously only said this so she could use it as a jumping off point to talk about anti-Semitism in general. I felt like from that moment on the book was kind of messy.
It kind of drives me crazy that she gets Steve Bannon's whole trick of appealing to everyone who feels unseen by the left, and then proceeds to kind of lecture and talk down to the reader. I don't think this book is going to change many minds. It's definitely written for an audience that already agrees very strongly with Klein's world view. It's got that feel of "I pat myself on the back for having the right opinions" that is always so annoying even if you agree with said opinions. I really wish she'd done more work to re-evaluate her approach. I feel like she got halfway to understanding how to make things better but then stalled out and fell back into old habits. She didn't quite manage to connect all the dots on how we got here and what to do about it and you can kind of see her floundering.
Toward the end this book started to get really repetitive and it basically had three endings? It definitely could have been edited down pretty significantly. I'm glad she didn't stick with what she first wrote, but she really should have just scrapped that all together. I was really left feeling like this book could have benefited from being shelved for a few years and revisited. I honestly really related to her obsessive need to make sense of this experience, but it doesn't actually feel like she was done processing it into something worth sharing. But I totally get that she wanted to take all that effort and pour it into something useful, and as time went on it would get harder to tie it all together with the current moment and package it as something relevant to everyone.
But honestly I would have liked it more as a straight memoir and less a political analysis. I just think it's interesting she had to deal with getting mistaken for someone else who's opinion started out close to hers and then went off the deep end. As someone who struggles to remember which is which I'm like yeah, that's gotta suck. I get it.
But this isn't just a book about the struggle of being confused with someone else. Naomi uses this to talk more broadly about polarization and the way the right grotesquely mimics the left and the strange way the far left has been absorbed into the far right (ie antivaxxers, fitness gurus, etc.) Sometimes this extrapolation works really well and sometimes it's a bit of a stretch. I mean, at it's core, Naomi just wanted to write a book about other Naomi. And honestly, that's the book I wanted to read. But I get that she wanted to make it something more so as to not seem totally obsessed with something that probably only seemed to matter to her.
Weirdly at one point near the end she asserts that it's racist of people to confuse the two of them (because apparently they're both Jewish), which was so off-base. Like dude, why would you go there? It's like she forgot for a second that it's not just the far right who get confused, but everyone? Because we're talking about two women named Naomi who write very similar things. And not everyone even knows what they look like? But she obviously only said this so she could use it as a jumping off point to talk about anti-Semitism in general. I felt like from that moment on the book was kind of messy.
It kind of drives me crazy that she gets Steve Bannon's whole trick of appealing to everyone who feels unseen by the left, and then proceeds to kind of lecture and talk down to the reader. I don't think this book is going to change many minds. It's definitely written for an audience that already agrees very strongly with Klein's world view. It's got that feel of "I pat myself on the back for having the right opinions" that is always so annoying even if you agree with said opinions. I really wish she'd done more work to re-evaluate her approach. I feel like she got halfway to understanding how to make things better but then stalled out and fell back into old habits. She didn't quite manage to connect all the dots on how we got here and what to do about it and you can kind of see her floundering.
Toward the end this book started to get really repetitive and it basically had three endings? It definitely could have been edited down pretty significantly. I'm glad she didn't stick with what she first wrote, but she really should have just scrapped that all together. I was really left feeling like this book could have benefited from being shelved for a few years and revisited. I honestly really related to her obsessive need to make sense of this experience, but it doesn't actually feel like she was done processing it into something worth sharing. But I totally get that she wanted to take all that effort and pour it into something useful, and as time went on it would get harder to tie it all together with the current moment and package it as something relevant to everyone.
But honestly I would have liked it more as a straight memoir and less a political analysis. I just think it's interesting she had to deal with getting mistaken for someone else who's opinion started out close to hers and then went off the deep end. As someone who struggles to remember which is which I'm like yeah, that's gotta suck. I get it.