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The Double:
Finalist, Best Writing Award, Melbourne Prize for Literature, 2015
A brilliant collection of short stories by a new voice in Australian fiction.
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.
Maria Takolander is a senior lecturer in literature at Deakin University in Geelong. She is the author of a work of literary criticism and two poetry collections. Her poems have featured in annual best-of anthologies for the past seven years. This is her first book of fiction.
'Maria Takolander's stories are written in a bewitching minor key. Haunting and mysterious, this is a collection that you will want to savour, then read all over again.' Danielle Wood
'A captivating and slightly uncomfortable series of tales that are in turns frightening, amusing, haunting and reassuring...The settings alternate between the familiar scenes of rural Australia and the more unknown background of Northern Europe, but it is the characters that really shine in this collection...Takolander's stories are...undeniably powerful.' Australian Bookseller and Publisher
'Fiercely intelligent and idiosyncratic, sometimes shot through with black humour, sometimes pressing down on the reader with the full weight of human horror...Individually, Takolander's stories can be bleak. But collectively they are thrilling. Slender as this collection may be, it announces the arrival of a considerable talent.' Australian
'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.' Melbourne Review
'Incisive, economic, imbued with simple depth and glittering with hard truth, The Double is a literary force. Poetic in its brevity, the stories are none the less substantial, speaking of the nature of courage, the damage done by ignoring the past, and human beings' ability to torture themselves.' West Australian
'[Maria Takolander's] stories seem like wordscapes that offer panoramic views without shunning fine, sometimes devastating, details. They reverberate with the passage of time, especially those stories that link Australia to northern Europe, to Stalinism...Takolander's prose has a quite gorgeous directness, a desert-like sparseness, even when - no, especially when - the topic is melancholy or fearsome.' Australian Book Review
'This debut short-story collection...is eerily beautiful and not for the faint of heart...It's the kind of book that will unnerve you and keep you up at night.' Readings
'An intriguing collection of short stories...The esoteric tales explore themes of passion, death, desire and redemption.' Sunday Life/Sun Herald
'shot through...brilliantly with humour and satire.' Otago Daily Times
- GenresShort Stories
1 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 21, 2013
5 people are currently reading
42 people want to read
About the author
Maria Takolander
22 books4 followersMaria Takolander was born in Melbourne in 1973 to Finnish parents. She is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Ghostly Subjects (Salt, 2009), which was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. Her poetry appeared regularly in The Best Australian Poems and The Best Australian Poetry, and it has been widely anthologised nationally and internationally, including in Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011). A program about Maria’s poetry aired on Radio National in 2015, and she has performed her poetry on ABC TV and at numerous festivals, including the 2017 Medellín International Poetry Festival in Colombia. She won the inaugural Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, and her short-story collection The Double (Text, 2013) was shortlisted for The Melbourne Prize for Literature Best Writing Award. Maria’s words can also be found on bronze plaques in the Geelong CBD and at the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 4, 2013
Cross-posted on my blog: http://literaryminded.com.au
One of the best contemporary short story collections I've read, Takolander's fictions are intellectual, dark, strange and often dystopian. The tone is of casual realism, but what's described is beyond that: fantastical, nightmarish or just off; my favourite kind of fiction. If you like Kafka or Beckett, or MJ Hyland for that matter, you'll like Takolander; or if you find meaninglessness meaningful. Or if you like your imagery as dark crystals:
a woman remembering her brothers' 'white bodies shatter the black mirror of the lake. Immediately they are sucked below' (from 'The Double').
Objects that speak to a man, like a strap that says 'hang on' and doors that say 'out you get' (in 'The Obscene Bird of Night').
A man weeping in a diner as a woman called Svetlana cuts his steak. A dog outside keeps barking. And starlings are '[s]weeping through the insects. Their noise as shrill as panic. Their tiny hearts like ticking bombs' (from 'Three Sisters').
The stories don't seem to say 'can you imagine?' but 'somewhere this all happens'.
The stories in the first part all have the names of books. In 'The Interpretation of Dreams' men are eaten away by desires. But what is the student's mother fading from? Violent masculine scrutiny? This realist story could be the darkest of all.
There's an element of satire in the final pieces which all concern a mythical text and poet. They revolve around people associated with the study and care-taking of words: academics, a librarian, judge of a poetry competition (who suffers the severe effects of a concrete poem).
At the heart of these (and carried through the collection) is some nod to ambition: it's displayed as a straw-sucked egg in the face of all the words already out there, and all the nothing.
One of the best contemporary short story collections I've read, Takolander's fictions are intellectual, dark, strange and often dystopian. The tone is of casual realism, but what's described is beyond that: fantastical, nightmarish or just off; my favourite kind of fiction. If you like Kafka or Beckett, or MJ Hyland for that matter, you'll like Takolander; or if you find meaninglessness meaningful. Or if you like your imagery as dark crystals:
a woman remembering her brothers' 'white bodies shatter the black mirror of the lake. Immediately they are sucked below' (from 'The Double').
Objects that speak to a man, like a strap that says 'hang on' and doors that say 'out you get' (in 'The Obscene Bird of Night').
A man weeping in a diner as a woman called Svetlana cuts his steak. A dog outside keeps barking. And starlings are '[s]weeping through the insects. Their noise as shrill as panic. Their tiny hearts like ticking bombs' (from 'Three Sisters').
The stories don't seem to say 'can you imagine?' but 'somewhere this all happens'.
The stories in the first part all have the names of books. In 'The Interpretation of Dreams' men are eaten away by desires. But what is the student's mother fading from? Violent masculine scrutiny? This realist story could be the darkest of all.
There's an element of satire in the final pieces which all concern a mythical text and poet. They revolve around people associated with the study and care-taking of words: academics, a librarian, judge of a poetry competition (who suffers the severe effects of a concrete poem).
At the heart of these (and carried through the collection) is some nod to ambition: it's displayed as a straw-sucked egg in the face of all the words already out there, and all the nothing.
September 14, 2015
In a 2012 interview with Sydney’s ‘City Poet,’ Kate Middleton, Takolander makes the following comment about her short stories: “I think, in a way, that my short stories in general are extended prose poems... I’m not quite as interested in character as perhaps most short story writers. I’m really just learning...It’s all experimentation...The ideas and my love of language drive my writing, not character or plot.”
Having now read Takolander’s short stories I think she undersells herself. Almost all of them contain vivid characters, some of them drawn with only a few words. An Australian writer of Finnish heritage, Takolander has so far been best known as a poet. It’s likely that her book of short stories will increase her visibility as a writer.
As to the stories themselves, I had mixed feelings. The book is divided into two unequal sections. The first contains a series of grim, dour, sometimes violent stories; brutal fathers often appear, and Freud’s Oedipus complex turns up more than once. Perhaps Takolander’s heritage is the reason for the pervading pessimism and dark atmosphere, in which decay and stench and places without joy or humanity prevail.
However, the second part of the book contains four stories that are linked by the fictional ‘Roānkin philosophy of poetry.’ These stories present a different world entirely. The decay and sense of pessimism is still there, but it’s shot through so brilliantly with humour and satire that the effect is altogether different. I was pleased to see this other side of Takolander’s writing, otherwise I might have written her off as an exceptionally gloomy Scandinavian. These four stories are wonderfully funny, and alone make the book worth reading.
Some of the early stories are experimental – in one, various inanimate objects speak to the unnamed main character; in another Takolander continually addresses the reader, asking if we see or hear. Others verge on science fiction: one features a man in a full state of paranoia in a world where there seems to be no one else, another takes place in a world where men are almost entirely missing. The overriding feature of Takolander’s writing is her dynamic use of words, which confirms her statement above about her ‘love of language.’
My initial reaction to the stories was to feel switched off by the general desolation. On reaching the four ‘poetry’ stories at the end, my view of Takolander’s writing shifted. The bleak early stories come into a different focus, somehow, in the light of the humorous ones.
Having now read Takolander’s short stories I think she undersells herself. Almost all of them contain vivid characters, some of them drawn with only a few words. An Australian writer of Finnish heritage, Takolander has so far been best known as a poet. It’s likely that her book of short stories will increase her visibility as a writer.
As to the stories themselves, I had mixed feelings. The book is divided into two unequal sections. The first contains a series of grim, dour, sometimes violent stories; brutal fathers often appear, and Freud’s Oedipus complex turns up more than once. Perhaps Takolander’s heritage is the reason for the pervading pessimism and dark atmosphere, in which decay and stench and places without joy or humanity prevail.
However, the second part of the book contains four stories that are linked by the fictional ‘Roānkin philosophy of poetry.’ These stories present a different world entirely. The decay and sense of pessimism is still there, but it’s shot through so brilliantly with humour and satire that the effect is altogether different. I was pleased to see this other side of Takolander’s writing, otherwise I might have written her off as an exceptionally gloomy Scandinavian. These four stories are wonderfully funny, and alone make the book worth reading.
Some of the early stories are experimental – in one, various inanimate objects speak to the unnamed main character; in another Takolander continually addresses the reader, asking if we see or hear. Others verge on science fiction: one features a man in a full state of paranoia in a world where there seems to be no one else, another takes place in a world where men are almost entirely missing. The overriding feature of Takolander’s writing is her dynamic use of words, which confirms her statement above about her ‘love of language.’
My initial reaction to the stories was to feel switched off by the general desolation. On reaching the four ‘poetry’ stories at the end, my view of Takolander’s writing shifted. The bleak early stories come into a different focus, somehow, in the light of the humorous ones.
July 6, 2023
The short stories in the first section are quite disparate, in that the author is clearly trying to achieve something different in each one in terms of voice and literacy device. I appreciated the variance, and there were a few stories which I was thoroughly interested in. The Red Wheelbarrow and The Double were the standouts, and for those, I actually wanted more exploration of the characters and setting and themes. In fact, I would probably have preferred The Double to be a novella of that particular story.
Two elements I found frustrating, however, is that there was often a lot of repetition, which is not my favourite device, and the depictions of women was generally very unflattering and bordering on misogynistic. I also can't say that I was a fan of including a certain young man's preferred method of self-pleasuring.
The second section, however, is wildly different and this is where I lost interest. The interconnected stories were cleverly written and the satire also shone through, but I think it works best for a niche audience of academics who can best appreciate its awkwardly true humour. Printing it in a series of newspaper articles or columns would have been a better medium for it.
Two elements I found frustrating, however, is that there was often a lot of repetition, which is not my favourite device, and the depictions of women was generally very unflattering and bordering on misogynistic. I also can't say that I was a fan of including a certain young man's preferred method of self-pleasuring.
The second section, however, is wildly different and this is where I lost interest. The interconnected stories were cleverly written and the satire also shone through, but I think it works best for a niche audience of academics who can best appreciate its awkwardly true humour. Printing it in a series of newspaper articles or columns would have been a better medium for it.
November 9, 2013
Some great short stories here. I liked "The Double" a bit of a thriller with gentle pacing; "The Interpretation of Dreams" in which the protagonist must surely be autistic (which must also be flavour of the month in author land); and "Roakin and the Judge..." in the second part, a musing on losing sanity a la Edgar Allen Poe's Raven and The Telltale Heart. Takolander switches voices for different stories, clearly ascribing characteristics, though they are all passive and deeply flawed. Which, let's be honest, makes for an interesting read.
March 2, 2014
Passable but not remarkable stories.
The title story is haunting and effective and there's something strangely appealing in the quirky "alternate-realty" academia series of stories that kick off with "A Roankin Philosophy of Poetry" but mostly these stories seemed to reach for depths of emotion and heights of lyrical expression that they weren't quite able to reach.
The title story is haunting and effective and there's something strangely appealing in the quirky "alternate-realty" academia series of stories that kick off with "A Roankin Philosophy of Poetry" but mostly these stories seemed to reach for depths of emotion and heights of lyrical expression that they weren't quite able to reach.
August 22, 2013
Didn't do much for me--all the boys read like girls!!!! Stories are okay but pretty bland and some of them are really anti-feminist.
April 2, 2015
Haunting short stories by Maria Takolander touch the sad and tender in human nature as her characters are caught in dreamlike worlds beyond their control. Mesmerizing and powerful.
March 11, 2016
A collection with great literary resonance. See my review essay, The Year's Work in Fiction, in the Australian journal Westerly 59.1
July 24, 2022
These just didn’t work for me. A few of the stories were great in isolation but the collection didn’t come together. I actually DNF, it lost my attention towards the end.
January 26, 2014
Haunting but also witty. I loved the imagery and the precise prose.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews