The Double (And Other Stories)

Maria Takolander

The Double (And Other Stories)
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Text Publishing Co
Country
Australia
Published
21 August 2013
Pages
264
ISBN
9781922079763

The Double (And Other Stories)

Maria Takolander

Mum and Dad were sitting up in bed, the dark veneer of the bed head framing them from above the waist and the white sheet messed up around their legs. Dad’s mouth was smeared with blood. It was on his teeth. He was panting. Mum was looking into her lap, where she was squeezing her left fist with her right hand. I could see the thumb sticking out, a chunk of flesh hanging off and blood streaming down.

A student travels to Estonia to investigate his violent father’s upbringing. A woman is possessed by visions of her brother’s brutal death at a lake in Finland. A bride plumbs the depths of her loathing for her husband on a journey across Africa. A lonely boy is haunted by nightmares of a new classmate who has an affair with their teacher.

Each of the stories in The Double is unnerving, and unforgettable. Ranging from rural Australia to Northern Europe and beyond, from the dark past of the Soviet era to a terrifying vision of the near future, this collection marks the arrival of a unique and bewitching talent.

Review

This debut short-story collection from Maria Takolander, a Melbourne-born and Geelong-based author and academic, is eerily beautiful and not for the faint of heart. The Double takes its title and epigraph from Dostoyevsky’s tale of a timid man plagued by his extroverted doppelgänger – and, like that classic novella, it’s the kind of book that will unnerve you and keep you up at night.

The Double begins with eight pitch-dark stories in which emotional and physical desolation are often linked. A man trudges along an ice-slicked street to find loneliness in a bar and his own home. Three ageing sisters subsist in marshlands ‘sinking into nothing’. A man hides out on an isolated farm: ‘the red earth stretched further than he would have thought possible’. These are also stories rich and vivid with unsettling sensory details, particularly of the human body. There are devastating, gut-wrenching moments. Mirrors and reflections are drawn in with subtlety and to great effect. In particular, the black mirror-lake that appears in the collection’s eponymous story is rendered unforgettable.

The last of the eight individual stories, ‘The War of the Worlds’, is my favourite – a bold literary sci-fi tale that focuses on the women and children left behind in a resources-stripped city during an interplanetary war. I was also impressed by Takolander’s deft use of diverse literary allusions throughout the collection – to Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, Stephen King, Freud and others, with many brought to immediate attention by the stories’ titles.

The Double concludes with a blackly humorous, absurdist series of four stories involving a mysterious and dangerous figure called Zed Roānkin (the first of these, ‘A Roānkin Philosophy of Poetry’, won the Australian Book Review short-story competition in 2010). Roānkin is perhaps a tormentor, perhaps a saviour – there’s a delicious twist. Torment, as Dostoyevsky and Takolander have found, can be entertaining and deeply rewarding.


Kate Goldsworthy is a freelance reviewer.

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