Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #231954 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-27
• Released on: 2008-05-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, June 2008: Imagine what it might be like to realize that the person you love is, in fact, not the person you love but a doppelgänger: or, what Leo Liebenstein coolly terms a "simulacrum" of his wife Rema at the outset of Atmospheric Disturbances. David Byrne's infamous cry that "this is not my beautiful wife" seems the most likely response, but Leo's reaction to this sea change takes unpredictable and dazzlingly plotted turns in the story that follows. Leo's journey to recover the "real" Rema is nothing short of byzantine; among its many mysteries is the delightfully inscrutable Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen, a master meteorologist who in cleverly constructed flashback sequences takes up residence in the daily rhythms of Leo and Rema's marriage and becomes as much a focus of Leo's obsession as his wife's whereabouts. (Think Vertigo but directed by Charlie Kaufman.) Make no mistake: this is dizzying debut fiction, bursting at the spine with beautifully articulated ideas about love, yes, but also--and with maddening resonance--about the private wars love forces us to wage with ourselves. Be sure to keep a pen or pencil handy: it's impossible to resist underlining prose this good. --Anne Bartholomew

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In this enthralling debut, psychiatrist Dr. Leo Liebenstein sets off to find his wife, Rema, who he believes has been replaced by a simulacrum. Also missing is one of Leo's patients, Harvey, who is convinced he receives coded messages (via Page Six in the New York Post) from the Royal Academy of Meteorology to control the weather. At Rema's urging, Leo pretends during his sessions with Harvey to be a Royal Academy agent (she thinks the fib could help break through to Harvey), and once Re- ma and Leo disappear, Leo turns to actual Royal Academy member Tzvi Gal-Chen's meteorological work to guide him in his search for his wife. Leo's quest takes him through Buenos Aires and Patagonia, and as he becomes increasingly delusional and erratic, Galchen adeptly reveals the actual situation to readers, including Rema's anguish and anger at her husband. Leo's devotion to the real Rema is heartbreaking and maddening; he cannot see that the woman he seeks has been with him all along. Don't be surprised if this gives you a Crying of Lot 49 nostalgia hit. (June)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Ron Charles

Rod Serling, strolling through a gallery of distorted portraits, should introduce Rivka Galchen's first novel. Atmospheric Disturbances takes place in the twilight zone of Leo Liebenstein's highly rational but utterly deluded mind. He's a middle-aged psychiatrist confounded by a strange problem: "A woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife," he tells us on the opening page. "Same everything, but it wasn't Rema." This "impostress" or "simulacrum," as he refers to her throughout the novel, looks exactly like his young wife, imitates her Argentine accent perfectly and possesses all her memories and attitudes. But he knows she isn't Rema. "Something was extraordinarily wrong," he explains. "It was just a feeling, that's how I knew." Because he loves her, "obviously and entirely and singularly," he tells us, "I had to go and search for the real Rema."

This sounds weird, of course, and it is -- deliciously so -- but on another level, it's common: After all, lots of people eventually conclude that their spouse isn't the person they once married. What husband, in a petty moment, hasn't shared Leo's cruel appraisal: "It would seem Rema was being played by someone older, or who at least looked older. Someone pretty, but not as pretty." What Galchen has done is play out that sad realization in the mind of a psychotic psychiatrist, a man thoroughly versed in others' delusions but unable to perceive his own.

The result is a steady descent into madness confidently reinforced by the methods and language of science. There are a few diagrams, a formula now and then, and some references that will remind you of things you've forgotten from high school. In fact, if you plot Atmospheric Disturbances on a piece of graph paper -- the kind of pseudo-scientific approach Leo would recommend -- you'll notice a trend line running through recent novels such as Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else. These brilliant young women infuse their stories with the language and tropes of scientific disciplines. They manage to appropriate the mystique of science, producing novels that seem somehow grounded in fundamental laws, even while satirizing the confident function that science plays in modern life.

Galchen received a medical degree with an emphasis in psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, a background that allows her to describe Leo's professional life as convincingly as she describes his descent into psychosis. Wandering around New York looking for his "real" wife, Leo challenges our objections in the most self-assured but absurd ways: "Why should I believe, just by fiat, that this woman was Rema, when that ran contrary to the phenomenology?" True to his academic training, he throws himself into systematic research with appropriate "experimental controls." This amounts to sitting in the library and writing random words on notecards: "HERONS," "WOOL PROCESSING," "HERMOCHROMATOSIS." Guffaw if you will, but he won't be dissuaded: "The way I proceeded with my investigation might cause me to lose credibility before mediocre minds," he admits. "I wasn't actually developing the detachment of a disordered psychotic -- I just wanted to concentrate, to stick to the business at hand."

What remains so unsettling, and often funny, about Leo is the way his intelligent observations slip into looniness. This tendency is most dramatically on display during his psychological treatment of a young man with "a fixed magical belief that he had special skills for controlling weather phenomena." In a misguided attempt to limit the man's dangerous behavior, Leo poses as a meteorologist -- Tzvi Gal-Chen, chosen at random from a list of leading scientists. This unorthodox technique appears to work at first, but very quickly Leo is caught in his patient's fantasy and becomes convinced that the real Gal-Chen must have something to do with the disappearance of his wife.

The novel's central, twisted metaphor revolves around Gal-Chen's work with Doppler weather radar. Leo clearly and correctly explains its operative principle as "the change perceived by an observer who is, relative to the wave source, in motion," such as the rising pitch of the sound of an approaching car. "Doppler effect refers to these distorted perceptions," he says, "and Doppler radar's utility relies on savvy interpretations of these distortions that, properly understood, enable a more accurate understanding of the real world." So far, so sane, but then suddenly Leo applies this phenomenon to his perception of his wife: "Let us imagine a source from which a Rema look-alike emerges every second. If the source is stationary, and I am stationary, then every second one of these Remas will pass me by." In one of the novel's innumerable loopy but cerebral moments, Leo announces what he calls the "Dopplerganger effect."

There are other, darker puns and doubles lurking in these pages, though their intention isn't always clear. The second half of the novel, for instance, takes place in Argentina, where the search for someone who has disappeared echoes the country's tragic recent history. And though there's no clue of it in the book, the author's father, who died in 1994, was a meteorologist named Gal-Chen.

All of this is impressively clever, but it's hard to sustain over the course of an entire novel, even a short one like this. Once you've laughed at Leo's psychotic tics a few times, they grow more familiar than funny. But just when the joke seems to have played out, when we've comfortably distanced ourselves from this ridiculous man, Galchen concludes with Leo's quiet, heartbreaking plan for the future. After all his craziness, it's a startling reminder of how ordinary his case is. How many perfectly sane people trudge along, hoping they can learn to love the stranger in the house -- or find the person they married?

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Ingenious but tedious
As much as this book is ingenious, clever, unique, poetic, and philosophical, I regret to say that it's tedious. There is simply no momentum, after the first 25 pages. The relationships have no plausibility. There is not enough plot, not enough real life. The main character does not "read" believably as a middle aged man. His mental life does not hang together as a genuine possibility. Events don't seem real. While reading I keep feeling like I was counting grains of sand, or sifting through cookie crumbs, or maybe sinking in quick sand. Although the amusing, clever gems kept coming, the novel didn't create a palpable world I could enter into.

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.

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!

No, it's not Pynchon. Yes, it's great
So yeah, the coverage on this book is a little confusing. This book IS great, and it IS Murakami-esque, and it IS Austeresque, and it IS heartbreaking. It's NOT so Pynchonesque, but I understood how it casually picked up that label in the press, because it's an easy quicktag on something that plays extensively with scientific language and ideas, and it's also not utterly alien in theme from the paranoid attention to detail of a book like Crying of Lot 49. But to such different ends and with different concerns. But that's not to say that this book isn't (or even is) fantastic...it's just descriptive kind of, without value judgment.

But when it does come to value judgment, the judgment that belongs here is that this is something emotionally ambitious, sincere and playful at once, and sentence by sentence it's just miles better than most writing today. I felt emotionally and intellectually engaged, which is basically what I seek out as a reader. The narrator's ways of thinking, and of seeing the world, will not win him citizenship awards, but will be achingly familiar to anyone who has ever honestly introspected.

Also, what I guess was most interesting to me, and most happily obscured, is the odd ways in which the meteorologist Tzvi Gal-Chen comes into the narrative; this, weirdly, seemed the emotional core of the book to me, though I wouldn't want to spoil things by explaining why I felt this way.