Atmospheric Disturbances - Softcover

Galchen, Rivka

Softcover

ISBN 10: 031242843X ISBN 13: 9780312428433

Publisher: Picador, 2009

Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Salon.com Top Ten Book of the Year
A Plain Dealer (Cleveland) Best Book of the Year
A Slate Best Book of the Year

Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances is a "witty, tender, and conceptually dazzling" (Booklist) novel about the mysterious nature of human relationships.

When Dr. Leo Liebenstein's wife disappears, she leaves behind a single confounding clue: a woman who looks, talks, and behaves exactly like her. A simulatcrum. But Leo is not fooled, and he knows better than to trust his senses in matters of the heart. Certain that the real Rema is alive and in hiding, he embarks on a quixotic journey to reclaim her. With the help of his psychiatric patient Harvey--who believes himself to be a secret agent able to control the weather--his investigation leads him from the streets of New York City to the southernmost reaches of Patagonia, in search of the woman he loves.

About this title

About the Author

Rivka Galchen received her MD from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, having spent a year in South America working on public health issues. Galchen completed her MFA at Columbia University, where she was a Robert Bingham Fellow. 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. Galchen lives in New York City. She is the author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances.

Reviews

*Starred Review* We often use weather to describe ourselves: she has a sunny disposition; he is rather chilly. But for Galchen, meteorological metaphors are veritable wormholes into the unconscious. In her funny, sad, and ingenious first novel, New York psychiatrist Leo keeps his patient, Harvey, who believes that he is a special agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorologists, grounded by claiming that he, too, works for the meteorologists. For verisimilitude’s sake, Leo says his contact is Tzvi Gal-Chen, an actual member of the actual academy. Harvey improves, but Leo becomes increasingly bewildered. It seems that Rema, his enigmatic Argentine wife, has disappeared and a simulacrum has taken her place. Perhaps Gal-Chen’s work with Doppler weather radar can help, or is Leo thinking of the doppelgänger effect? As her unmoored analyst searches for Rema in Argentina, Galchen––a Borgesian writer armed with a medical degree and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award and intent on a rapprochement between art and science––pays poetic tribute to her late father, the real-life meteorologist Tzvi Gal-Chen, and considers our myriad “errors of interpretation.” Witty, tender, and conceptually dazzling, Galchen’s metaphysical tale of longing, grief, love, and the volatility of the self gracefully charts the tempestuous weather of the human psyche. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 031242843X
• ISBN 13: 9780312428433
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 254