Atmospheric Disturbances

by Rivka Galchen

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 031242843X
• ISBN13: 9780312428433
• Release Date: April 2009
• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Great Debut... don't read the press reviews

Again, like someone else said, this is not Pynchonian in the slightest. This is a love story, albiet, an intellectual one as the writer certainly has quite an abundance of knowledge in the field that she writes about. It's short, and not many sentences require tons of re-reading to understand, which isn't a bad thing at all. It's a fun novel. And it's not entirely classifiable by itself either; it's not post-modern, nor is it purely for entertainment, nor is it tons of other things - it's simply a very good book with a combination of different styles. The characters and the plot they carry out are depressive and give the reader a certain "sinking feeling" while reading it, a sort of dramatic irony all throughout. All the while, the author and her wonderful prose present lovely humor at the same time. Recommended.

something pretty made out of something sad

Even though this novel was not a piece of "realism" in the most straightforward sense, what I loved about it most was how it was so very "real" emotionally. Uncannily so. You could really see a mind gathering up every possible defense--and this gathering was often hilarious--in order to avoid painful insights. And in the process of all that avoidance, something of itself beautiful gets made, like some enormous quilt being made in order to distract oneself from some larger sadness. And the sentences--I just wanted to underline like every other one of them!

No, it's not Pynchon. Yes, it's great

So yeah, the coverage on this book is a little confusing. This book IS great, and it IS Murakami-esque, and it IS Austeresque, and it IS heartbreaking. It's NOT so Pynchonesque, but I understood how it casually picked up that label in the press, because it's an easy quicktag on something that plays extensively with scientific language and ideas, and it's also not utterly alien in theme from the paranoid attention to detail of a book like Crying of Lot 49. But to such different ends and with different concerns. But that's not to say that this book isn't (or even is) fantastic...it's just descriptive kind of, without value judgment. But when it does come to value judgment, the judgment that belongs here is that this is something emotionally ambitious, sincere and playful at once, and sentence by sentence it's just miles better than most writing today. I felt emotionally and intellectually engaged, which is basically what I seek out as a reader. The narrator's ways of thinking, and of seeing the world, will not win him citizenship awards, but will be achingly familiar to anyone who has ever honestly introspected. Also, what I guess was most interesting to me, and most happily obscured, is the odd ways in which the meteorologist Tzvi Gal-Chen comes into the narrative; this, weirdly, seemed the emotional core of the book to me, though I wouldn't want to spoil things by explaining why I felt this way.

Tender and Beautiful and Really Funny

I read this book very quickly and then started reading it over again right away. What struck me most about it is how sincerely and beautifully and precisely (and inevitably humorously) described are all the fluctuating emotional states of being in love. I also loved that I didn't know quite where to stand in relation to the book--it's not quite going for realism, nor for absurdity, nor for fairy tale. It operates instead along the rigorous but odd rules of a dream.

Absorbing and hugely affecting

Atmospheric Disturbances is a funny and haunting reflection on relationships and love. In this incredibly imaginative book, the reader travels though Leo's mesmerizing world of reality and illusion. At the end of the journey we realize that nothing can ever be the same as before. The characters of Leo, Rema, Harvey and the mysterious Tzvi are memorable. This multilayered novel is poignant and compelling. The prose is eloquent. I couldn't put Atmospheric Disturbances down.