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| Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Rivka Galchen
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
Buy New: $12.48
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Avg. Customer Rating:  42 reviews
Sales Rank: 2786
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.9 x 1.1
ISBN: 0374200114
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780374200114
ASIN: 0374200114
Publication Date: May 27, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: New. Domestic orders ship immediately with tracking information. All international orders will ship Airmail to all destinations.
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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 doppelgaenger: 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
Product Description
When Dr. Leo Liebenstein’s wife disappears, she leaves behind a single, confounding clue: a woman who looks, talks, and behaves exactly like her—or almost exactly like her—and even audaciously claims to be her. While everyone else is fooled by this imposter, Leo knows better than to trust his senses in matters of the heart. Certain that the original Rema is alive and in hiding, Leo embarks on a quixotic journey to reclaim his lost love. With the help of his psychiatric patient Harvey—who believes himself to be a secret agent who can control the weather—Leo attempts to unravel the mystery of the spousal switch. His investigation leads him to the enigmatic guidance of the meteorologist Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen, the secret workings of the Royal Academy of Meteorology in their cosmic conflict with the 49 Quantum Fathers, and the unwelcome conviction that somehow he—or maybe his wife, or maybe even Harvey—lies at the center of all these unfathomables. From the streets of New York to the southernmost reaches of Patagonia, Leo’s erratic quest becomes a test of how far he is willing to take his struggle against the seemingly uncontestable truth he knows in his heart to be false. Atmospheric Disturbances is at once a moving love story, a dark comedy, a psychological thriller, and a deeply disturbing portrait of a fracturing mind. With tremendous compassion and dazzling literary sophistication, Rivka Galchen investigates the moment of crisis when you suddenly realize that the reality you insist upon is no longer one you can accept, and the person you love has become merely the person you live with. This highly inventive debut explores the mysterious nature of human relationships, and how we spend our lives trying to weather the storms of our own making.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 37 more reviews...
 Disappointing Debut June 10, 2008
58 out of 91 found this review helpful
I pre-ordered this book after reading some of the early press on it. I love the idea of doppelgangers in fiction, and am personally obsessed with the notion that these days we are all our own doppelgangers because of all of the different personae and narratives we have to carry around with us in this multitasking ADD world.
And while there are interesting ideas in Atmospheric Disturbances, and hints of better work to come from this author, there isn't much more than a short story's worth of story. But as a novel, Atmospheric Disturbances just doesn't hold up.
One day Leo Liebenstein discovers that his much beloved--or so we are told--wife, Rema, has been replaced by another (and what lover has never discovered that his or her beloved isn't the person s/he thought s/he was?). Liebenstein is a psychiatrist, and because of his expertise in that discipline, he knows that this is an external problem and not something originating within him.
Liebenstein has a psychotic patient named Harvey who believes he's part of, so to speak, a weather underground that's capable of controlling the weather. In a rather misguided attempt at trying to limit Harvey's possibly dangerous peregrinations, Liebenstein, at the suggestion of Rema, suggests to Harvey that he himself is part of this weather cabal. Liebenstein and his beloved choose an arbitrary weather expert called Tvsi Gal-Chen and bring him into this plot as the one who is providing Liebenstein the direction for Harvey.
But Liebenstein becomes himself obsessed with Gal-Chen and his work on single doppler radar and what he (or the author, way too cutely) calls the dopplerganger effect. A picture of the meteorologist adorns Leo and Rema's refrigerator, and Leo becomes obsessed with it--but we don't really know why. It may have its own doppler signature, but we really don't know.
Leo becomes obsessed with some very interesting problems posed by Gal-Chen (and this kind of thing is the most interesting part of the novel), such as how can we accurately predict what is going to happen in the future when we do not know with any accuracy what is happening now?
For no other reason than the author could probably write off a "research" trip to Argentina, Liebenstein lights out for Buenos Aires, a place in Galchen's writing that seems mainly characterized by dog droppings and the threadbare velvet of her mother, Magda's, house.
There, Liebenstein is chasing--what? His sanity? Some doppler indentation in time of his beloved Rema? There he also begins communicating with--he thinks--Gal-Chen, whom we also discover is actually dead. When Leo asks him about this, all via the evil BlackBerry, he responds, Do I seem dead?
Fascinating metaphorical possibilities that, sadly--no, it's more than sadly, it's wildly disappointing that they go no where. It's a bit like being teased that the author is going to pull some rabbit out of her hat, but never does.
But the overall failure to explore the metaphors latent in her material, to peel back the layers of this mysterious fruit until she discovers the truths buried in their cores, is the least of the problems with Atmospheric Disturbances.
The biggest issue is just how completely without literary substance her characters are. The unappealing Liebenstein is the biggest problem. As our guide through all of this is the centerpiece of the flat, unbelievable characters.
I like unreliable narrators, but Liebenstein is more unappealing than unreliable, though he is both. I have great affection for lots of psychotics in literature. They open up possibilities for the novelist of wild arias and flights of unpredictability in their logicless logic.
But Leo Liebenstein is such a wholly unappealing character--insofar as he is a character and not a cipher--that I kept wishing he'd prescribe himself some good meds. He has hairy hands, or more hairy than he would like. He calms himself by washing his hands. He's a caregiver of minds, but a misanthrope.
We are told that Rema loves him. That she is younger with dyed blond hair and more beautiful than he has any right to expect. She follows him to Argentina, sobs now and then. But the author gives very little reason to invest anything in him, or in Rema. This is not because she might be, as Liebenstein calls her, a simulacrum. Even if we take it as a given that a character is always in some respects a simulacrum, Rema is so thinly drawn that her lack of substance could only be forgiven if there were more substance in the novel to offset it.
Despite taking place mostly in two very distinct cities, there is almost no atmosphere here. New York consists mainly of an area around Columbia University on the Upper West Side (perhaps the author should have been drinking the magical waters of Brooklyn, instead). And Argentina, even when Liebenstein goes to Patagonia, never really assumes any kind of shape.
But there's another kind of New York lurking in the margins of this novel, the cloistered New York of the publishing world, that in some ways comes more vividly to mind than the New York the author apparently intends to portray.
Arriving, disappointed, at the end of this novel, it's hard not to blame the editor as much as the writer. Did Galchen's editor have no vision for this novel? Could s/he not have pointed to this or that part of the manuscript, pregnant with possibilities, and said, This should really be developed? Or is it asking too much for an editor to edit? Or maybe s/he was too intimidated by the author's credentials, her 'platform,' or too infatuated with her dark and sultry and plaintive good looks, to get down and go line by line and help deliver this book into the world much more whole than it is. But ultimately it's the author's name on the book, and so she must alone take responsibility for what can only be called a failed novel.
The apparent sophistication of the ideas here leave me with hope that the author can summon the complexity and subtlety of thought to play them out more convincingly and thoroughly. But I wish she'd at least have run this one through the typewriter one more time.
Pynchon this is not June 7, 2008
28 out of 41 found this review helpful
So after reading like ten articles on how Rivka Galchen is Thomas Pynchon incarnate, I bought Atmospheric Disturbances hoping for something cool and new and funny. I was disappointed, to put it lightly.
The book is narrated by Dr. Leo Lebenstein, a psychiatrist who is for some reasons convinced his wife, Rema, has been replaced by a simulacrum. And so he goes on a banal quest to Argentina for answers, going off the reservation and enlisting one of his crazy patients to help him. But no catharsis ever comes; if you are looking for a complex narrative with existential revelations, social commentary, or deep, multifaceted characters that change and feel real and you can connect with, this is not the book for you.
Galchen's prose is pretty clean, but I couldn't help to be bored to death by her characters. There is very little tension or suspense in the book because there are very few revelations throughout the course of the novel that create any sort of narrative momentum. The secrets behind all the weird occurrences and organizations are never explained, and it felt like a cop out to me. We never find out why anything happens, and I felt stifled and let down by the lack of development. Galchen also isn't very funny, contrary to what the insanely laudatory blurbs on the back of the book may lead you to believe (though there are some nice puns sprinkled throughout).
I didn't exactly dislike Atmospheric Disturbances, but I didn't exactly think it was any good, either.
Unbelievable, dull, sad and unengaging July 16, 2008
26 out of 33 found this review helpful
I never believed that the narrator's voice belonged to a middle aged man. His behavior is inexplicable without raising my curiosity. Many pieces of the story go oon for several chapters then peter out. Many favorites' names are mentioned to sell this book- however: "Vertigo" is engaging and beautiful. Charlie Kauffman writes funny pieces bristling with empathy. Borges rarely wrote anything longer than ten pages because he wanted his stories to be perfect. Rivka Galchen's promoters are over reaching to imagine that any reader will find corollaries to these masterpieces in her prose. It's too melancholy, too long, wretchedly impersonal and eventually just dull. I gave up after 200 pages. It's a big disappointment.
 Absorbing and hugely affecting June 9, 2008
21 out of 26 found this review helpful
Atmospheric Disturbances is a funny and haunting reflection on relationships and love. In this incredibly imaginative book, the reader travels though Leo's mesmerizing world of reality and illusion. At the end of the journey we realize that nothing can ever be the same as before. The characters of Leo, Rema, Harvey and the mysterious Tzvi are memorable. This multilayered novel is poignant and compelling. The prose is eloquent. I couldn't put Atmospheric Disturbances down.
No, it's not Pynchon. Yes, it's great June 14, 2008
17 out of 21 found this review helpful
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.
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