The best books that feature doubling

I read this gorgeous, fanciful book in the days after my second child was born, confined to bed with the baby but exploring the imagined city of Entralla with twins Alva and Irva Dapp. This novel is a municipal guidebook, illustrated with photos of a model of Entralla, created by Carey, who is also a visual artist.

The fiction is that Irva built this model: wanting to know her city but terrified to leave the house, she instead constructs a miniature of it based on reports from her twin sister. I love miniatures and models, so the idea of a replica of a city in a novel about twins was irresistible, apart from Carey’s delicious prose. 

Geoff Dyer has a funny, trenchant persona in his writing on travel and art, and this novel delivers those pithy insights through two fictional alter egos. This book does so many things I love, giving me fresh ways to see places, books, and ideas I know but never thought of this way, including new ways of thinking about the self.

The book’s first part tells of a middle-aged Brit called Jeff at the Venice Biennale; in the other, an unnamed middle-aged Brit relates an ill-fated voyage to one of India’s holiest—and most polluted—sites. The title is an obvious play on Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, but Dyer’s trying for the death of the author in autofiction. It set my neurons alight. 

This is actually just the first book of Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels, which tell a single riveting story of two girls, Lila and Lenù, from a depressed Naples neighborhood. Lenù is the narrator, taking us through fifty years of friendship and the latter half of the 20th century. (Her actual name is Elena, like the author—another doubling, especially since she writes under a pseudonym.)

I am a sucker for event: a lot happens and we get to know a huge cast of characters from the neighborhood. But our anchors are these two friends and rivals, vibrant and injured, striving to transcend their origins.

My mother is a member of the exact same generation as Rushdie, kids born at the moment when India gained independence, so I grew up in the shadow of that legacy—the optimism, the violence, the huge historical question mark. But when I picked up Rushdie’s magical-realist novel, it was the prose that spoke to me first: vivid, exaggerated, a cacophony, evoking India itself.

Our narrator, Saleem Sinai, was switched at birth with another child, and throughout the novel, images and phrases recur in different contexts. Often, these are puns that, by the second or third time they appear, have accumulated the weight of metaphor. I’ve read this book half a dozen times, and find more to enjoy with each reading.

I’m Canadian and, like all theatre people of my era, I first fell in love with MacDonald’s writing when I saw her ingenious breakout play, Good Night, Desdemona, Good Morning, Juliet. Then she published this, a captivating Maritime gothic full of ghosts and other hauntings, as well as visual doublings, such as mistaken identities, breathtaking in their wit.

Loosely inspired by the author’s own family history on Cape Breton Island, including both Lebanese and Gaelic-Canadian strands, this novel is a stunning example of historical fiction that is deadly accurate in its evocations of societal, cultural, and geographic strictures while also being hugely inventive. Lush and compelling.