In a review for The New York Times, Dwight Garner called Book of Numbers “more impressive than all but a few novels published so far this decade.” Joshua Cohen is also author of the novel Witz and the story collection Four New Messages, among other books. A critic for Harper’s, he lives in New York City, and spoke to me by phone.

Joshua Cohen: I first read Dostoyevsky when I was 14 years old, and was entranced. Dostoyevsky truly is a writer for 14-year-olds, and I mean that in the most approving way—approving of his energy, and rage, his endless pessimism, and endless innocence. There’s something especially adolescent—especially half-cracked, and sweaty—about The Double, which might’ve been the first book of his I read. When Golyadkin bumps into a stranger who appears to be him, or exactly like him, we aren’t sure if our hero’s haunted by a ghost, or suffering a psychosis. Which is to say, we aren’t sure which world we’re in. Ancient or modern? Magic or science? Ultimately, the plot will pass judgment—but until then, the ambiguity intrigues.

The doubles tale found its way from folklore into literature during the Enlightenment, whose concern for individual rights was romanticized into two separate, even contradictory, strains. That destiny or fate could be controlled, but urges couldn’t—that if you wanted to leave hearth and home, you needed to. Impulses were imperatives: To go abroad, self-fictionalize, and become another person.

The earliest doubles tales take on two forms. One is where the double escapes—from your reflection in the mirror, or in the water—or else it’s your shadow that escapes, and ventures into the world to do its business, or to do your business: desublimating all your appetites, acting out all your suppressed or repressed desires. Traditionally, this version concludes with a character dueling with his double—to assert his claim over a woman, or just over his original uniqueness. But if the double dies in the duel, the original dies too—it’s a fairly convoluted way of committing suicide.

Then there’s the second form of the doubles tale, where the double emerges from the original, only to return, and become reintegrated—through an occult spell, or a technological feat. But the doubling of this version is most frequently bound to cycles, as if indoor urban humanity were attempting to more firmly root itself in the seasons and phases from which it’d been alienated—from the full moon that causes hairs and snouts to sprout and sends werewolves out to go ravage the fields.

For the first type I’d cite the Germans. In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Geschichte vom verlornen Spiegelbilde [The Story of the Lost Reflection], a stolid, gloomy burgher visits Italy, is enchanted by a local temptress, and leaves his double behind in her embrace. For the second type I’d cite the English. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll & Hyde, the hero decides on the terms of his transformation, in a process that’s explained not through the supernatural but the natural, or at least through biochemistry.