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A review by dontpanic42
Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen
2.0
Atmospheric Disturbances is the story of Leo, a psychiatrist who comes home one day to find that the woman in his home--though she looks almost exactly like his wife--is not in fact his wife. This sets him off on a search for his real wife that takes him to Buenos Aires (her birthplace) and then down to Patagonia. Along the way, he is influenced by a metereologist, Tzvi Gal-Chen (who, odd though it may be, I can only assume to be the author's father, given various things revealed during the book), whose work he reads and associates with his own search; and also by Harvey, a patient of Leo's who frequently disappears after he is instructed (or so he believes) by a secret society to travel to different places so as to control the weather in an ongoing, worldwide weather war. Leo's wife, Rema (or, as Leo views her, Rema's doppelganger), pursues Leo to South America in an effort to convince him of his obvious (to the reader, at least) psychosis.
It's an interesting premise, to be sure (though the doppelganger novel has been done before, and done better--try Saramago's The Double), but Galchen did not impress me with her execution.
First of all, the book is lauded in the reviews on the back as a number of things: humor; romance; psychological thriller; etc. But the story is almost never humorous, in any sense of the word. And the thriller aspect of it, to the extent it exists, is not compelling. What this book is, at its heart, is a romantic tragedy. Rema and Leo both love each other--that much is clear--but each is destined for frustration. Leo believes that his real love (his real wife) has disappeared, and his love for her leaves him unable to love the doppelganger he believes has replaced her. At the same time, Rema loves her husband and follows him, literally, to the ends of the world, but she is destined to be frustrated by standing by a man who no longer believes that she is actually herself. This book is tragic from the very beginning, as we see Leo spiral slowly into psychosis, and I fail to see the other aspects that the book reviews allude to. I believe that you will enjoy this book more if you simply go into it with the understanding that it is fundamentally a tragedy--and a moving and heartbreaking one, at that.
If mischaracterization were the only issue, I would have rated this book higher, but it suffers from another flaw that is crippling for any novel, no matter the genre: it lacks believability. The credibility of the novel peters out at the same time as Leo plunges deeper into his psychosis. My best guess is that this stems from the fact that Leo is the narrator of the book, and Galchen must have struggled greatly to convey a plausible story from a man who is steadily losing his sense of reality. Alas, I think the author failed in her effort. She raises a number of questions that go unaddressed, and she jumps over the answers by leaping into an abrupt ending. Some may excuse this deficiency by saying that anything hard to understand was simply a figment of Leo's psychotic imagination, but that answer is glib and unsatisfying. An unreliable narrator and a complete story are not mutually exclusive.
I can overlook the overly clinical writing style (attributable, no doubt to Leo's occupation, but still an unfortunate choice for narration) and the unnecessary, strange appearance of the author's father in the story. And I think the book has tremendous potential as a romantic tragedy. But in the end, the elements of the story are lost to the author's control and the reader is left grasping for the plausibility needed to make this a good novel.
It's an interesting premise, to be sure (though the doppelganger novel has been done before, and done better--try Saramago's The Double), but Galchen did not impress me with her execution.
First of all, the book is lauded in the reviews on the back as a number of things: humor; romance; psychological thriller; etc. But the story is almost never humorous, in any sense of the word. And the thriller aspect of it, to the extent it exists, is not compelling. What this book is, at its heart, is a romantic tragedy. Rema and Leo both love each other--that much is clear--but each is destined for frustration. Leo believes that his real love (his real wife) has disappeared, and his love for her leaves him unable to love the doppelganger he believes has replaced her. At the same time, Rema loves her husband and follows him, literally, to the ends of the world, but she is destined to be frustrated by standing by a man who no longer believes that she is actually herself. This book is tragic from the very beginning, as we see Leo spiral slowly into psychosis, and I fail to see the other aspects that the book reviews allude to. I believe that you will enjoy this book more if you simply go into it with the understanding that it is fundamentally a tragedy--and a moving and heartbreaking one, at that.
If mischaracterization were the only issue, I would have rated this book higher, but it suffers from another flaw that is crippling for any novel, no matter the genre: it lacks believability. The credibility of the novel peters out at the same time as Leo plunges deeper into his psychosis. My best guess is that this stems from the fact that Leo is the narrator of the book, and Galchen must have struggled greatly to convey a plausible story from a man who is steadily losing his sense of reality. Alas, I think the author failed in her effort. She raises a number of questions that go unaddressed, and she jumps over the answers by leaping into an abrupt ending. Some may excuse this deficiency by saying that anything hard to understand was simply a figment of Leo's psychotic imagination, but that answer is glib and unsatisfying. An unreliable narrator and a complete story are not mutually exclusive.
I can overlook the overly clinical writing style (attributable, no doubt to Leo's occupation, but still an unfortunate choice for narration) and the unnecessary, strange appearance of the author's father in the story. And I think the book has tremendous potential as a romantic tragedy. But in the end, the elements of the story are lost to the author's control and the reader is left grasping for the plausibility needed to make this a good novel.