The Double
August 2013
Maria Takolander / Text Publishing
An intriguing collection of short stories, The Double comprises an unsettling journey into the lives of Takolander’s peculiarly distant and troubled protagonists as they explore the dark recesses of the human condition.
Crossing the globe from Australia, to Finland and Africa, the stories are separated in space and time, but seemingly connected through the characters’ sense of isolation; all are haunted by seemingly vivid images of their pasts, or stifled by the present.
The Red Wheelbarrow sets the scene as a young man endeavours to understand his father’s violence by returning to the site of his “primitive” upbringing in Estonia. In The Double, a middle-aged woman recalls her own childhood in an attempt to piece together the night of her brother’s death. She remembers “the flailing limbs” as two boys jumped into the “bleak depths” of the forest lake, but in keeping with the other stories, the truth remains ineffable, a mere reflection on its black mirrored surface.
As Takolander’s stories transition between the surreal and disturbingly real, boundaries become increasingly blurred, culminating in The Interpretation of Dreams where a young boy is plagued by nightmares of his classmate Amelia’s sexual predation of his teacher. At times however, the stories themselves are so esoteric they require almost subconscious interpretation, our focus diverted toward the defamiliarised landscapes Takolander so beautifully creates.
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