She followed Wolf’s social media, watched in horror her televised appearances, and pursued her down the rabbit hole – or through the looking glass – of conspiracist thinking. Her transformation – or derailment, as Klein would have it – has seen her teaming up with far-right media personalities like Steve Bannon and issuing torrents of misinformation and paranoia.Īppalled at being confused with Wolf, Klein developed a dogged obsession. That all changed when Wolf’s writing veered away from sexual liberation and female empowerment into conspiracies about Ebola, ISIS and ( most recently) the COVID pandemic, complete with fear mongering about vaccines, mask mandates and impending tyranny. Because Wolf was older and more established than Klein, being mistaken for her initially brought a frisson of celebrity. “Other Naomi”, her “big-haired doppelganger”, is the American author of feminist bestseller The Beauty Myth and was once a celebrated and very public figure on the broad left. The backbone of Klein’s personal story is simple enough. Capitalism is the ultimate cause of the dire societal challenges we face, she argues, and people on both sides of the political mirror – right-wing conspiracists and liberal critics alike – fail to recognise it because they are mired in individualist ways of thinking. Fleshmanpix/FlickrĪlong the way, Klein returns to several of the animating themes of her previous books. Naomi Klein begins Doppelganger by reflecting on being confused with Naomi Wolf (pictured).
In her new book, Doppelganger, Klein makes her experience of being confused with another high-profile author, Naomi Wolf, the stimulus for an extended meditation on the nature of doubles, mirror-worlds, and the political and personal challenges of threatened identities. No Logo (1999) attacked corporate malfeasance, The Shock Doctrine (2007) catalogued the exploitation of disasters to roll out neoliberal policies, and 2019’s On Fire marked her increasing focus on the climate crisis. Such is the experience of Naomi Klein, Canadian author of a string of anti-capitalist blockbusters. The idea that we have a double, someone who treads on the toes of our uniqueness, perhaps deliberately, can create deep anxieties and resentments. These confusions are usually trivial and droll, but sometimes they become sinister and destabilising. Names and appearances are fallible markers of personal identity, especially as populations grow and we become exposed to a dizzying multitude of other people. The experience of being confused with someone else is probably universal. Review: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World – Naomi Klein (Allen Lane) “Nicky Haslam has known everyone from Greta Garbo to Cole Porter to the Royal Family.” Curses! I had been confused with my namesake, the famous British interior designer and scourge of vulgarity, and my paper with one of his books.
Whatever exquisite sensibility I might possess was well hidden beneath a scholarly armour of logic, evidence and jargon. And there was nothing particularly Proustian about it either. “Masterpiece is an overused word,” the reviewer wrote, “but this Proustian evocation is indeed a masterpiece.”
Idly googling myself some years ago, I came upon an unusually glowing reference to one of my academic papers.
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