'Double-Wolf, Brian Castro's third novel, is a brilliant fictional creation which succeeds also in being humane, utterly readable and sometimes very funny.
'It takes as its starting point the life of Wolf-Man, Freud's most famous patient who inspired his work on infant sexuality, a life revealed in counterpoint to that of Artie Catacomb, con-man, psychoanalyst and archivist, who ends his days in the Blue Mountains, relegating the Wolf-Man to the world of myth even as he avoids the baleful glare of the shop assistant who would prevent him from entirely reconstructing the Wolf-Man's story.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Brian Castro dramatises and even valorises forms of literary and artistic failure throughout his fiction, but his body of work is a raging success by mortal standards. None of his novels disappoint on close inspection. Double-Wolf and Shanghai Dancing are endlessly rewarding; The Swan Book is gorgeously written and deeply moving; After China is conceptually neat, seductive and stylish. Others, such as Drift and The Bath Fugues, appeal to select readers but are dazzlingly rich and structurally brilliant. Even Stepper—which Castro sees as a relatively conventional spy novel—is a satisfying and affecting Nabokovian game. Every novel is stamped by a talent that induces envy as much as gratitude. You want to know what it feels like to write that way.' (Publication abstract)
'Brian Castro's novel Double-Wolf (1991) is a playful fictionalization of the life of the Russian aristocrat Sergei Pankejeff (Pankeyev, 1886–1979), known to history as the "Wolf Man." This essay seeks to situate Castro's novel within the context of both psychoanalysis and literary postmodernism and to explore the particularities of the Wolf Man case as a narrative that problematizes the borders of fictionality. Like Pankejeff himself, Castro's Double-Wolf remains both skeptical and faithful to Freudian precepts. To maintain this double affinity, the novel adopts a parodic stance and is written in the form of a postmodern farce. However, the purpose of the parody is not finally to suggest that the insights of psychoanalysis are nonsense but that their truth so radically disrupts common sense that they can only be upheld in an absurdist register. Just like Freud's case history, the novel turns on a primal scene, and it is only the existence of such a scene that makes the encounter between the novel's two protagonists (Sergei Wespe and Art Catacomb) meaningful. While the plot of the novel revolves around the attempt to prevent a scandal—the fear that a suddenly chatty Wolf Man might belatedly subvert the psychoanalytic practice that his neuroses helped establish—its true subject is the deeper scandal of knowledge itself and the fact that it might end in a scene and not a statement.' (Publication abstract)
