The Biblio Blogazine

 Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen (2008)
 Fiction, 256 pages
 First Picador Edition, May 2009
 Published by Picador

 Read for Picador Book Club:
 Picador’s Twitter Account
 The discussion of this book
 Note: Due to some technical difficulties, not all participants, including myself, were recorded by Twitter.

“Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.”

So starts the story of Dr. Leo Liebenstein and his search for his “real” wife Rema. However, it’s not that easy.  As the reader comes to discover, reality is in the eye of the beholder. Is Rema really an imposter? Or is Leo having a crisis such that he can no longer recognize what he once took for granted? That what he has known all along is no longer the same. People change. But in his eyes, she is so different, she has to be another person altogether.

This book has received mixed reviews, and I can understand why. It isn’t for everyone. But…and there’s always a “but”, the mixed reviews come from readers like me who understand many works of literary merit, but not at the level of a professor or professional critic.

In the New York Times and some Lit-Fic blogs, it was received extremely well. And let me tell you, reading those reviews intimidated me about as much as the book did.

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. — Liesl Schillinger, New York Times

This is a first for me.  Dostoyevsky hasn’t done it. Kafka’s come close. I’m not even going to attempt Proust. I know my limits. Yet in reading the book, and some of those reviews, I felt like “I” was the problem. If I were only more educated or intelligent, I would feel the same as these learned folk.

Which is crap. No one should read a book and be left feeling inadequate.

As I’ve said before, probably more than once, the reader brings to each book their own voice, the one in their mind that reads the narrative and deciphers its meaning. It is a voice schooled by life experiences as much as academia. And mine, apparently, isn’t up to the task of having to work as hard as I did to try and get through this book.

That doesn’t mean this is a poorly written book with a dismal plot and undeveloped characters. On the contrary, this book cannot be faulted for any of those reasons.

On simple terms, this is a story about relationships: one between a husband and wife and the other, of the person we are and the person we are expected to be. It is about what happens when these relationships break down and how, if not reconciled, we deal with the resulting fall out of loving someone we thought we knew – but didn’t, not completely.

As time passes, I will begin to wonder how far my collaboration with the simulacrum might, or could, or should, or shouldn’t go. Perhaps we’ll eventually find ourselves wholly making believe as if she is the original Rema, as if nothing has happened. That is perhaps what we were meant to do. Be partners in solving a poorly defined crime. Appear normal.

Rating this book is hard because I’m unsure of it being tarnished by the fact that I’m not cerebral enough to make this book work for me as it has for others. Also, it could be, that I just don’t have the right mindset at the moment to give this book a fair shake.

But this is my blog. This is where I share with you my opinions about the books I read. Thus, according to my rating system, it is getting 2 out of 5 stars. I cannot say I “barely” finished the book – it wasn’t that much of a chore. But it was a struggle.

To be fair, I am linking below other reviews of this book that should give you more insight than I have. Please base your decision to read Galchen’s novel based on the overall impression gleaned from all of these opinions — not just mine:

By other bloggers: (2 positive, 1 negative)

Review of Atmospheric Disturbances by Michelle over at 1morechapter.com
Another review by Raych at Books I Done Read
And one more by Tim over at Baby Got Books
What’s being said over at LibraryThing about this book
(not a blog, but many bloggers and regular readers post here)

By magazines/newspapers (All positive)

As reviewed by Jonathon Gibbs at The Independent.co.uk
Who Do You Love? by Liesl Schillinger, New York Times
She’s Not Herself by James Wood, The New Yorker
A Relative Stranger by Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Rivka Galchen is a writer and physician. She is currently an adjunct professor in the writing division of Columbia University’s School of Art.

Her essay on the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics was published in The Believer, and she is the recipient of a 2006 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Atmospheric Disturbances is her first novel.