Surreal, confusing, draining, stilted, hyperreality, posturing, self-consciously clever and ultimately unsatisfying. These are just some of the words that immediately come to mind as I sit here trying to articulate my feelings about this book. For a different reader, one who enjoys postmodernism or post-postmodernism, perhaps these words would add up to a more enjoyable reading experience than they did for me.

Superficially, the novel opens with psychiatrist Leo Liebenstein's assertion that his wife has been replaced with a simulacum, one who is so close to the original that only the most astute (his) observation could prove otherwise. Ostensibly, the reader is supposed to be clever enough to follow and accept his arguments as truth as well. And so Leo, after failing to convince this doppelganger to admit to her complicity in his real wife's disappearance, takes off on a mission to find the real Rema. His peripatetic journeyings are driven by signs he finds in the scientific (mind numbingly so) writings of meteorologist Tzvi Gal-Chen and by his disappeared pyschiatric patient Harvey, who believes that he controls the weather in his role as a secret agent.

The secondary characters are essentially incidental to the story, even Rema herself, as Leo's thoughts and feelings reign supreme here, even if the reader has determined that he is suffering from a mental illness (Capgras Syndrome for anyone curious enough to research it). Is this an appropriate conclusion on this reader's part? I can't say for certain but it made Leo slightly more sympathetic to me and so I had to go with it. Because honestly, aside from feeling that the main character was fairly delusional and therefore pitiable, I wasn't engaged by the story at all. It was, quite simply, tedious reading. I understood the line blurring going on between reality and perception and the juxtaposition between the scientific and the emotional but none of this questioning within the framework of a very slight story made for an appealing read. A book which isn't immediately accessible is not necessarily bad but it isn't automatically elevated into the pantheon of worthy and complex writing either, a place to which this particular book seems to aspire too graspingly. Obviously I didn't love this book but there certainly are loads of academicians and much higher brow reviewers who think it's all that and a bag of chips so look widely at the reviews before coming to any conclusions. As for me though, I'm sticking with my assessment: "The emperor's naked." ( )

I "got" this book on an intellectual level, but didn't find it as enjoyable a read as I had hoped. ( )

“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.

This is a first for me.

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.

Rating this book wais 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. ( )

The book is disturbed by the overly elaborate and deliberately artificial plot, as several reviewers (for example, the NYT) have noted. But Galchen's strength isn't large-scale, theatrically managed post-surrealism: it's the small-scale, deliberate disturbances she makes at the level of the sentence. Here the narrator meets his future wife:

"Over the sound of milk being steamed I asked, alarmed, 'Do I stare at you?'"

That line is wonderful: "Do I stare" is just a little bit wrong, like many things in the book, and the detail about the steaming milk (in a coffeeshop) is typical of the concise and uncommon descriptive terms Galchen sprinkles throughout the book. The next line is:

"'You are from Hungary?' came from her, now in a louder voice, to the sound of silverware being sorted."

Almost every line of dialogue in the book is similarly exact and off-tone. Galchen's experiments, in that sense, are more in the line of Gertrude Stein, and that is where I hope her next novel takes her: away from the precious and artificial cleverness, and toward more common, everyday, inexcusable weirdness.

The idea of a psychotic narrator (not just an unreliable narrator, but one whose very reliable and predictable -- and in this case professional -- logic is used unremittingly to excuse and obscure his psychosis) is rare, and "Atmospheric Disturbances" belongs with the non-fiction "Memoirs of My Mental Illness." The problem is that "Memoirs" is real -- in it, a lawyer argues that his own psychosis is controllable -- and it is therefore much more serious, not at all campy, and also, incidentally, far more bizarre than "Atmospheric Disturbances." A closer comparison is Tom McCarthy's "Remainder": they are both meditations on loss of identity, and both cushion us from anything too painful by continuous shows of verbal and logical virtuosity. Less virtuosity, and there would be more danger. ( )

This first novel starts out irresistibly.

"Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife. This woman casually closed the door behind her. In an oversized pale blue purse – Rema’s purse – she was carrying a russet puppy. I did not know the puppy. And the real Rema, she doesn’t greet dogs on the sidewalk, she doesn’t like dogs at all. The hayfeverishly fresh scent of Rema’s shampoo was filling the air and through that brashness I squinted at this woman, and at that small dog, acknowledging to myself only that something was extraordinarily wrong."

Oh, what delights this first paragraph promises! One might as well read that the main character has awakened to find that he has become a giant cockroach overnight.

Leo Liebenstein, Rema’s husband and the narrator of the novel, doesn’t hesitate to tell the simulacrum that he doesn’t believe she is Rema. The woman laughs at her 51-year-old psychiatrist husband, attributing his odd statement to a migraine headache. All the while, he is totting up the odd ways in which she is just like his wife: the same Argentine accent, the same walk, the same hair, but somehow not the same Rema.

It seems like a clue that one of his patients, the meteorologically-obsessed Harvey, disappeared only two days before the real Rema did. Harvey had a habit of disappearing, but Rema and Leo had cooked up a scheme to keep Harvey close to home: the creation of Tzvi Gal-Chen, a fellow with the Royal Academy of Meteorology, who instructs Harvey to monitor the weather in New York City, his home town. Reality overlaps into the novel here, so far as the reader can tell: Gal-Chen is Galchen, apparently the author’s real-life father, apparently actually a member of the Royal Academy of Meteorology; the pictures that appear in the book appear to really be pictures of Tzvi Galchen and his family, including the author. But where does reality begin and where does it end?

That, dear reader, is the question the whole book asks – and never answers. Indeed, perhaps that is a question that cannot be answered, not by this book, and not by anyone.

Leo mounts a search for the real Rema, thinking to find some guidance somehow in the meteorological writings of Tzvi Gal-Chen. He travels to Argentina and meets with Rema’s mother, Magda, whom he has never met before. The mystery deepens when Magda asks him whether he has ever met Rema’s husband, stating that she doesn’t much like the husband. Leo has no idea how to search for Rema, especially because he doesn’t trust Magda sufficiently to advise her of the problem or even of his own identity as her real husband. Then he finds Harvey, who is also in Argentina on a meteorological mission, apparently on orders of Gal-Chen. Leo starts communicating with Tzvi Gal-Chen himself, via Blackberry; he soon finds out that Gal-Chen is dead but still communicating with him. Before long, Leo has given up the idea of practicing psychiatry and has taken a meteorological job in Patagonia, posing as a 27-year-old Bowdoin College ice climber.

Is Leo insane? Who has been posing as Gal-Chen and answering his emails? Who is Rema? What does Harvey really have to do with anything? How did Leo get that job in Patagonia? Did Rema have a different husband at some point in time? Was Gal-Chen really a meteorologist in real life? (That appears to be the case, according to Wikipedia, but we all know how reliable Wikipedia is; the author of this novel could have written the entry as an extended part of her novel, for all we know.) On the other hand, you can buy a book called Mesoscale Meteorology - Theories, Observations and Models (NATO Science Series C: (closed)), edited by D.K. Lilly and Tzvi Gal-Chen, from Amazon, so perhaps…. Well. The nature of reality is definitely questionable, as this novel makes us appreciate.

Atmospheric Disturbances can give you a migraine as severe as the ones from which Leo suffers if you try too hard to follow his various speculations, but it is worth just about every throb of the temples. Few novels are so strange, and so thoroughly, thematically, consistently strange, never once falling into the understandable or the sensible.

Unfortunately, Galchen’s novel is perhaps 50 pages too long. As an author, she seems to get stuck in her own spirals, mazes and conundrums, and to be unable to get her characters out and into a resolution, or to find a way to simply abandon them in absurdities. A sort of tedium sets in toward the end of the book, as oddities pile up higher and higher; frankly, were I Rema, I would have had Leo involuntarily committed for his own safety at about page 150 (if not before). But perhaps that is my own unreasonable penchant for underlying realism asserting itself into a scenario in which it doesn’t belong.

I look forward to Galchen’s sophomore effort. Atmospheric Disturbances is a promising start on a career of a talented absurdist or fabulist; you choose the label. This is simply the sort of weird, off-center, strange story that I love to read. ( )