Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen

The Barnes & Noble Review

If Charlotte Perkins Gilman of "The Yellow Wall-Paper" fame had collaborated with Philip K. Dick to rewrite Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers, the hallucinatory result might remind you of Rivka Galchen’s debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances. The well-ordered life of psychoanalyst Leo Liebenstein has been lent color and quirky charm by his exotic flower of a wife, Buenos Aires–born Rema. But panic and disorientation set in one day when, upon the most dubious of subliminal clues, Leo decides she has been replaced by a "simulacrum," an imposter who, for reasons unknown, has taken the place of the real Rema. The manic fugue state and search that follows dovetails curiously with the paranoid fantasies of Leo's patient Harvey, who believes he is a secret agent in the employ of the Royal Academy of Meteorology, using weather manipulation in battle against the sinister 49 Quantum Fathers. Galchen’s ingenious metaphorical play with meteorology, taken together with her conspiracy-based game playing, suggests a heavy influence from Thomas Pynchon. ("49" Quantum Fathers indeed!) But whereas the trials of Oedipa Maas, however surreal, achieved an indisputable earthbound objectivity, the unreliable first-person narration by a plainly psychotic Dr. Leo lends a tone of deadpan fever dream to the whole of the narrative. Like Rima the Venezuelan Bird Girl in W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions -- an earlier Latina victim of "civilized" intervention -- this Rema is also "killed" by a mind rendered disordered by the Anglo disease of too much thinking: Galchen’s ultimate villain. --Paul DiFilippo

From the Publisher

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. 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.

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.

The Washington Post - 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…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 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 New York Times - Liesl Schillinger

Galchen's inventive narrative strategies call to mind the playful techniques of Jonathan Lethem, Franz Kafka, Primo Levi and Thomas Pynchon. But she also, quite deliberately, echoes the Argentine giant Jorge Luis Borges…You don't have to be a weatherman to see that Galchen's brainteasing book, whatever its pretexts, is an exploration of the mutability of romantic love. Although she has intellectualized and mystified her subject, intentionally obscuring it in a dry-ice fog of pseudoscience, the emotional peaks beneath her cloud retain their definition…Anyone who has suffered the everyday calamity of the lessening of love, the infinitesimal diminutions of regard that drain a relationship of its power, knows what a relief it would be to blame science fiction. This cerebral, demanding, original new writer helps make the charges stick.

Publishers Weekly

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 49nostalgia hit. (June)

Time

. . . a dense, fractally complex first novel by the conspicuously talented Rivka Galchen.

Entertainment Weekly

Achingly beautiful.

The Economist

The story is genuinely suspenseful, and Leo's clause-heavy patter feels fresh and wry-his perspective curiously weird-even as he unravels. Ms Galchen is a writer to be watched.

The Wall Street Journal

. . . Hailed as a graceful handshake between science and literature . . .

Beth E. Andersen - Library Journal

To Dr. Leo Liebenstein, a New York psychiatrist, it's the puppy that gives it away. His much younger "real" wife, Rema, does not like dogs, so this woman who looks like Rema and smells like Rema and has brought him the puppy must be a simulacrum. Leo tells the faux Rema that he's on to her and wants his real wife back. Leo also believes that his missing patient, Harvey, is tied to the mystery. And what of the Royal Academy of Meteorology (RAM), which Harvey says has employed him as a secret agent? The real Rema convinced Leo to impersonate RAM staff member Tzvi Gal-Chen in his therapy work with Harvey, and now Leo is calling Gal-Chen on his Blackberry from across the ocean. But could Leo be talking to a dead man? Galchen's astonishing debut is rich in detail and scientific exploration and a kind of dreamy psychological dissembling that keeps the reader as baffled as Leo right to the end. This dense, brilliant novel should be much in demand, especially for book groups eager for the challenge of dissecting and reconstructing the clues in a search for the solution. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ3/1/08.]

Kirkus Reviews

Everything is other than it appears to be in Galchen's assured debut-an intricate puzzle powered by an urgently beating heart. That organ and the brain sustained by it are the property of Galchen's narrator, New York psychiatrist Leo Liebenstein-who immediately informs us that his South American-born wife Rema has disappeared and been replaced by a "simulacrum" only superficially similar to the woman he loves. Leo's paranoid suspicions seem no more bizarre than the claims of another missing person: his delusional patient Harvey, who insists he is "employed as a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology," assigned to control the weather and to foil the nefarious 49 Quantum Fathers, whose experiments threaten the climate's very survival. What's really going on in Leo's crowded mind is hinted at in several allusions to T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" and in a pattern of metaphors that link the relative predictability of human behavior with Doppler radar, triangulation and similar up-to-the-minute climatological measuring and verification techniques. With immense subtlety, Galchen assembles a deeply moving picture of a lover plaintively seeking permanence in a context of inexorable relativity, instability and change. And, in provocative glancing reference to "the disappeared" victims of Argentina's 1970s "Dirty War," there is perhaps a buried allusion to Rima the bird girl, the lost loved one of W.H. Hudson's romantic classic Green Mansions. A superb first novel. Agent: Bill Clegg/William Morris Agency

Product Details

• ISBN: 0374200114
  
• ISBN-13: 9780374200114
• Format: Hardcover, 256pp
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Pub. Date: May 2008
• Sales Rank: 6,765

• Reading Group Guide

Reading Group Guide