Body Double
by Hanna Johansson
reviewed by B.J. Woodstein
Body Double by Hanna Johansson is a literary novel combined with a thriller and it leaves the reader questioning what has happened and what it means; it is not necessarily for the kind of reader who dislikes ambiguity.
First, we meet a woman who works for a ghostwriter, transcribing the recordings that people have made about their lives before the ghostwriter can write their memoir for them. Mostly, she just listens and transcribes, not getting engaged in the stories, which are often unremarkable in many ways, beyond that, and meanwhile living her own quite ordinary days. The transcriber’s previously orderly life is thrown into tumult when she listens to a recording, ready to transcribe, but eventually comes to think that this particular tape must be aimed at her. The question is: who knows that she transcribes for the ghostwriter and wants to send her a message?
Meanwhile, two women, Laura and Naomi, meet in a seemingly random fashion. They have very similar trench coats and they accidentally swap them one day at a cafe. This initial encounter is awkward, but it connects them. From then on, they end up repeatedly meeting, at first in apparently accidental ways, and then forming a relationship that is perhaps best described as unhealthy. One of them begins to imitate and eventually take the place of the other.
These two parallel stories – the ghost writer’s transcriber and the two women at the cafe – join together in a way that is not always clear to the women themselves or to the reader. There is a blurring of stories and lives and personalities that makes it hard at times to differentiate who is doing or feeling or thinking what. There are surrealistic elements to Body Double, and it can read almost as a fever dream, making readers consider how much of what people say in the book is true. What is true, what is false, and what might possibly be both at the same time? The style is both distanced and detailed, weaving together aspects of the story in a way that draws readers in while also potentially confusing them and making them uncomfortable. Body Double could be described as being like a queer, female version of a Paul Auster novel or perhaps like an updated version of a film by Hitchcock, or maybe as similar to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive; Johansson herself described it as like a 'European co-production thriller from the turn of the millennium, like Haneke’s Cache.' All this means that the book can feel familiar in some ways due to these other reference points, but nonetheless, it is evocative and chilling.
Body Double
Norstedts, 2025, 206 pages
Foreign rights: Nordin Agency
Hanna Johansson is a writing teacher. Her first novel was Antiken (Antiquity), which was published in 2020 and received the Katapult Award in 2021. It was reviewed by Alex Fleming in SBR 2022:2.