Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel | Rivka Galchen | Amazing, thought-provoking, delightful novel.

Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel | Rivka Galchen | Strange and unusual

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Atmospheric Distur...

	Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel Rivka Galchen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 45 reviews view larger image
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Amazing, thought-provoking, delightful novel.

Rivka Galchen's first novel is amazing. Her prose and sentence structure is unique, and makes for an enlightening read. The story, about a psychiatrist who thinks the love of his life, Rema, has been replaced with a doppleganger, is a great metaphor for the numerous disguises and caprices love takes. Even though I am in the scientific field more or less, I still found her attempts at incorporating various scientific facts and observations about climate, wind patterns, Doppler effect, etc. somewhat difficult to comprehend, although she does a fairly good job of explicating and commingling it with her many ruminations and philosophical insights sprinkled throughout.

Initially, I purchased this book on a whim, but I am very glad I did, and I will definitely be reading it again, and recommending it to others!

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Strange and unusual

Wow! I just finished reading this amazing book. Did I love it? I think so. Or did I hate it? Maybe that, too. All I know is, when a story agitates me this much, it definitely has my attention. If you like a book that stirs things up and knocks you around a bit, get this one. If not, better pass it by.

More of an ink-blot than a story-plot?

Be warned: despite its publisher's synopsis, this book is not another rewrite of Jack Finney's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"! Instead, Rivka Galchen's "Atmospheric Disturbances" may just do for Capgras Syndrome (a rare mental disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that someone they know has been replaced by an identical-seeming impostor) what Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" did for Asperger Syndrome (and autism generally) back in 2003. Told from a similar first-person perspective, "Atmospheric Disturbances" chronicles the increasingly irrational behaviour of its protagonist as he attempts to track down and recover his real wife following her mysterious replacement one night by a doppelganger. But whereas Mark Haddon spends most of his book building up the reader's empathy with (or at least sympathetic understanding of) his teenage autistic protagonist, before finally making us aware of just how far from any understanding or real empathy we are, Rivka Galchen engages us mostly with the puzzle that her protagonist is himself grappling to solve.

The central puzzle afflicting clinical psychiatrist Dr Leo Liebenstein is essentially the unexplained disappearance of his wife, Rema, and her replacement with a simulacrum which only Leo recognises as not being the real Rema. The story-line elucidates this puzzle through various bizarre complexities, most of which centre on Leo's conviction that his wife's disappearance must be linked to the disappearance of one of his own psychiatric patients, Harvey, and the particular details of Harvey's delusions (or "deviations from the consensus view", as Leo is careful to call them) that he has special powers, enabling him to control various aspects of the weather, as a result of which he is frequently sent on secret assignments, communicated to him via coded messages in the New York Post, on behalf of the Royal Academy of Meteorology in their on-going struggle across various parallel universes against the machinations of the 49 Quantum Fathers.

I fear, though, that in presenting Leo's predicament as her main subject, with the steps taken to resolve it seemingly supplying the central story-arc, the author may have set a trap for herself--or rather for her readers, many of whom will probably expect this puzzle to be played out and solved (or at least explained) by the end of the book. Such readers may be sadly disappointed if they don't manage to pick out the real subject or story-line of the book along the way. Similarly, any readers who expect the book to offer any explanations or revelations beyond the issues it turns over (or more accurately, I suppose, mulls over) as it progresses will similarly be disappointed. And quite possibly bewildered.

There are times when "Atmospheric Disturbances" can be extremely bewildering indeed if you do not work to keep up. And Rivka Galchen really does expect her readers to work hard and to keep up mostly on their own. She does not go back to rescue anyone who falls by the wayside. For those of a mind to keep up, the book's strength lies not so much in where it goes, as in the countless ambiguities and possibilities for digressions that it throws up for the reader (as well as the protagonist) along the way.

If you are looking for a story in this book, you will probably be disappointed. Rather, what it does is to hang on to its story-line a series of explorations of many things, leaving each reader to connect the dots as they see fit--a kind of narrative equivalent of the psychologists' Rorschach ink-blot. It is a book that revels in the (often unintentional) poetry that is to be found in specialist scientific writings and which explores the potential of what happens when one re-attaches emotional significance, but reduced understanding of the specifics, to a scientific phraseology which is supposedly devoid of emotion and which expects a high level of understanding of the specifics of its subject matter. The author explores love, and loss, and people's feelings about their place in the world, while at the same time exposing as bogus any notion that there is in fact such a thing as reality which we all must accept and which is necessarily the same for everyone. For reality is nothing more than the extrapolated product of our own perceptions.

In blending her own background (she qualified as an MD specialising in Psychiatry) and her experiences of Argentina with the characters of both Leo and Rema, and in introducing her own real-life father (a world-renowned research meteorologist who died in 1994) and his actual scientific writings as one of the central characters in the puzzle facing her (fictional) protagonist, the author blurs the distinction between real and invented and between story-telling and fact. Her use of real, solid science (and her refusal to dumb that down to make it more accessible) as a basis for Leo's rationalisations of his (often bizarre) course of actions lead the reader further down avenues of uncertainty about whether Leo is indeed caught up in some vast conspiracy, whether there is some other tangential conspiracy into which he is merely being drawn, or whether he is, in fact, merely delusional. (After all, just because he's paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get him, does it?) The further into the book one gets, the more blurred become all of the distinctions between reality and fancy. Which is the whole point entirely. And which might leave many feeling that all-in-all this book is far too clever for its own good!

Ultimately, you may find you need to invest a lot of effort to get anything out of this book. Whether you will then find that worthwhile... well, that's not for me to say!

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Clinical: From Convulsion to Conclusion

Every professional reviewer of this work has, within the second paragraph, invoked the names of Borges, Eco, Murakami, or other figureheads of so-called 'fantastic' literature. What is fantastic literature, anyway? Is eschewing conventional plot norms, and the slavish needs for 'real' details and fleshiness in character, really all that 'fantastic'? Or by 'fantastic' are we now identifying a genre, established through the genius of masters who were once avant garde, but have now provided a template for metaphysical strangeness?

With books like Galchan, it must be the latter. The reason Borges gets mentioned so often is, quite frankly, because the book reads like Borges lite. It has a certain Twilight Zone vibe . . . simulacra, swapped identities, mind/body duality, etc, etc. But these subjects have been tackled by far more imaginative designs, with far more experimental prose. If one is going to take up these well rehearsed themes, there really should be something innovative and gripping about the method. Otherwise, the only real doppleganger here is Galchan's storyline, which itself is a duplicate of the oft-told tale of 'is she, isn't she/ to be and not to be' metaphysical mystery.

What's original here? Well, owing nothing more than personal history, Galchan can draw upon her father (a famous meterologist, apparently) for the central symbol: doppler radar. Also being a licensed psychiatrist, Galchan can swoon us with references to Lacan, Deleuze, and other megawatts of contemporary identity theory. Grad students may smugly enjoy the illusions to 'epistemes', but those who have been there/done that will be less than awed.

So what's left then? The same corporeal enigma that has informed so-called 'metaphysical' literature since Genji monogatari . . . which to my mind is the first instance of soul/body swapping in the beloved's life. Is she, isn't she? The book only becomes a predictable rehashing of something so many other have described, so much more interestingly, to be totally honest. I mean, even Murakami have more textures. But, if you don't want to put up with the challenging stylistics of Pavic, or the philosophical confrontations of Borges, than this lightweight take on ontology will get you through an airplane ride.

As for the literary tweak at the end? You see it coming. Bruce Willis in 'The Sixth Sense' was more of a climax burner than this. Or you know how in 'Fight Club' Tyler Durden is -- SPOILER ALERT -- a projected self of the narrator? WHOOA! And as for Gal-Chen? Wait for it! Wait for it! WHOAAA! You can all applaud now, and for the next trick from this Criss Angel of the New Yorker prose set?

It's just not that original or gripping. I don't know why everyone's fawning over this work . . . have we forgotten magic realism already, that this stuff seems so funky? I must be truthful here: the only reason I write these reviews, which seemingly annoy people who think every book ever written deserves '5 stars', is because I am fed up with the media machinery running today's book industry (which is the hands of four or five conglomerates). I'm tired of the pump and dump attitude telling me which is this month's genius. I'm sick of reading reviews in which the publicity still of the author takes up more space than the text supposedly critiquing the book. Rivka Galchan is just the latest (soon to be forgotten) example in a long line of Borges copycats. Remember how Yann Martel won a booker prize by ripping off a plot device from a Brazilian novelist? As I said, talk about duplicates . . . the Argentian government should sue for copyright violation in this tale.

If reviewers (or I should say publicists) didn't insist on pumping up these new novels as if they're masterpieces, I wouldn't mind so much. Just treat it for what it is: a not too bad revision of questions you ask when you're 18 and in a philosophy class. If reviewers were honest (or better read) in regards to writers like Galcan, we would all avoid the disappointment. But I say save your money. Bolano's '2666' will be translated into English by November. Now that'll have some real pyrotechnics in it. (And no one hailed Bolano as a genius until he was pretty well dead of cancer.)

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