One and a quarter readings into Rivka Galchen's cerebral, accomplished first novel (it's one of those that demands a reasonably immediate re-read), I'm still unsure about how naturalistically (or perhaps 'realistically' is a better way of putting in - ie, in line with what the book's psychiatrist narrator calls the 'consensus view of reality') it should be read. On balance, despite the hints of outright anti-realism, at least in the representational/mimetic sense (the implausible happenings it apparently chronicles, the deliberate echoes of Borges and The Crying of Lot 49), I think it can more readily be read as a particularly intriguing 'unreliable narrator' text, the unlikely convictions (the book's starting point and central story driver is the narrator's belief that his wife has been replaced by an impostor who looks and acts almost exactly like his wife), perceptions and experiences of the narrator, including his weird emotional responses (or lack thereof) and diminished affect, symptomatic of some psychological disturbance of his own. But it's hard to tell - perhaps not only are both valid readings, but in some slippery (undecidable?) sense need to be engaged in at the same time to really get anywhere near the bottom of Atmospheric Disturbances.Also occupying me a bit: to what extent is it a story about love, and to what extent a love story? (Answer, I think: to a very large extent, both. Either way, it made me sad - I felt sorry for the characters, but especially Rema.)
Anyway, file on the same shelf as, I reckon, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and it's not a world away from what I was trying to get at a while ago in relation to Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, either.
(Incidentally, while carrying Atmospheric Disturbances around and reading it in a range of more or less public places over the last few weeks, I've noticed an inordinate number of people looking at its cover, sometimes surreptitiously and sometimes quite openly - there must be something about it that catches the eye, though that thought didn't prevent me once or twice slipping into brief daydream reveries about the possibility that the looker was, say, the author's sister or somesuch other concerned party...)
