I found out about Atmospheric Disturbances, by Rivka Galche, through the NYTimes’s UrbanEye mailing list. It’s about a psychiatrist who thinks his wife has been replaced by a doppelganger and tries to find his real wife.
From the very beginning of the novel, it’s questionable whether his wife really has been replaced or if it’s all in his head, especially since the only patient of the doctor’s that we ever meet has similar delusions. Because I have these doubts so early on (hello… the narrator is a psychologist), and because they’re not really answered until the very end of the book, I found most of it kind of boring. You can’t take anything that the narrator says very seriously because you think he’s crazy. I liked the idea of the novel enough to give me hope that there’d be more, but I ended up expecting there to be so much more to it that I was disappointed.
I don’t regret reading Atmospheric Disturbances but it’s not a book I would tell other people to read. Here are my highlights:
Loc. 103-5, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 03:00 PM
She does often manage to give people the impression that she loves them in a very personal and significant way; I must admit I find it pretty tiresome dealing with all her pathetic devotees who think they play a much larger role in her life than they actually do;
Loc. 148-51, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 03:07 PM
Functionally speaking, Harvey’s main problem—or some might say his “conflict with the consensus view of reality”—stemmed from a fixed magical belief that he had special skills for controlling weather phenomena, and that he was, consequently, employed as a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology, an institute whose existence a consensus view of reality actually would (and this surprised me at the time) affirm.
Loc. 174-75, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 03:11 PM
When asked about his absences, Harvey’s elucidation tended to go no further than to say that he was “laboring atmospherically.” Arguably these disappearances actually endangered his life.
Loc. 186-88, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 03:13 PM
I did make a few other efforts to gently instill in Harvey some creative doubt in the internal perceptions of his world—such doubt being the usual cornerstone of delusional treatment and the path back to the consensus view of reality. But I failed.
Loc. 198-200, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 03:15 PM
But that I—unlike Harvey—was an agent of superior rank. Who was in touch with an agent of even more superior rank. “Psychotics very much respect ranking,” she announced authoritatively.
Loc. 214-16, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 04:17 PM
“There’d still always loom the possibility of being discovered, of being revealed as a liar. I wouldn’t be able to go a day without worrying. I can’t live like that.” “Oh,” Rema answered with a small unimpressed shrug, “but that’s what life is like all the time, no?”
Loc. 262-63, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 04:24 PM
it struck me anew that I’d once thought that after enough time with me she would have put on a precious little potbelly and let her hair remain messy at home.
Loc. 277-78, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:01 AM
it seemed like she’d been infected by a very American idea of identity, to think that who you were mostly consisted of what you did to get paid—that seemed silly to me.
Loc. 302-4, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:05 AM
I don’t mean to be smug by proclaiming my inherent honesty; I don’t think of my honesty as moral value, since I think of morality as involving choices, and I’ve never particularly chosen to be honest, have simply never been able to be otherwise, feel rather predetermined to fail at lying.
Loc. 372, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:14 AM
But when I pushed her as to what she noticed, she
Loc. 377-78, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:15 AM
Even though I know better than to trust appearances, especially posed, studio-airbrushed, heathered-backdrop appearances, still: the Gal-Chens had the look of a happy family.
Loc. 382-84, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:16 AM
at times such “feelings”—such limbic system instinctual responses—are the most superficial and anachronistic of all, like the feeling a baby duck must have when it responds more strongly to a stick painted red than to the beak of its own mother.
Loc. 393-95, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:19 AM
I liked to watch her try to pour from the little metal teapot without spilling, which wasn’t easy, since at almost any angle the water’s path of choice was to travel retrograde along the outside of the spout and spill on the table.
Loc. 404-6, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:21 AM
My mother used to say that almost any problem could be solved by one of the following three solutions: a warm bath, a hot drink, or what she called “going to the bathroom,” though she never specified what was to be done there.
Loc. 441-42, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:29 AM
I’d gone where I wanted her to be, not where there was any reason or unreason for me to believe she actually would be.
Loc. 450-51, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:31 AM
Sometimes it terrifies me, when I sense the exponenting mass of human lives—of unlabeled evidence of mysteries undiscerned—about which I know nothing.
Loc. 468-69, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 08:49 PM
Though my initial progress did not look or feel like progress, I believe it was a kind of progress, that of just staying in place, of not slipping backward into despair.
Loc. 477-78, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 08:51 PM
It’s just like how we have so successfully forgotten as a species that a smile was born as a masking afterthought to the sudden baring of teeth. At least that’s the most convincing smile theory I’ve heard.
Loc. 560-63, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:04 PM
I would search feet and hands and wrists and crooks of elbows, and it would be difficult for me not to reach out and place the pad of a finger on those veins and feel the blood coursing through. It’s like a ghost living in us, our blood, that’s what I think it is like, having something within us—like our blood, like our livers, like our loves—that goes on about its business without consulting us.
Loc. 575-76, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:05 PM
I don’t know where things like that disappear to, the kinds of things one has on one’s fridge.
Loc. 834-36, added on Wednesday, May 13, 2009, 07:09 PM
for me silence is like a humid swelling of scents, originless clicks, phantom elbow pains, a puff of air near the eyes, a sense of grass pushing up through the earth somewhere, or everywhere at once.
Loc. 922-23, added on Thursday, May 14, 2009, 08:51 AM
“Oh I’m sorry, you see I said I’m happy with anything when actually the opposite is true, I’m never satisfied.”
Loc. 937-38, added on Thursday, May 14, 2009, 08:54 AM
I had a little moment of imagining being over there on that side of the mirror, the side where we were happy and new and now forever.
Loc. 984, added on Thursday, May 14, 2009, 09:02 AM
I’m not the only psychiatrist who advocates occasionally leaving silences silent, not confounding confession with intimacy.)
Loc. 1241-43, added on Friday, May 15, 2009, 08:51 AM
I asked the Rema-ish waitress for an apple Danish; it tasted like real apple rather than like apple flavoring. Ironically this made the taste seem ersatz to me, on account of the fact that all my childhood the apple flavor I knew and loved took the form of fritters wrapped in plastic.
Loc. 1356-57, added on Saturday, May 16, 2009, 11:51 AM
There was a time when the belief was prevalent that all those who cared for the mentally ill became mentally ill,
Loc. 1395-97, added on Saturday, May 16, 2009, 11:56 AM
Why did I use that word “legions”? The use of all caps for emphasis embarrasses me. And I cannot even express the nausea evoked by recalling my feeble attempt at mysterious wisdom.
Loc. 1404-5, added on Saturday, May 16, 2009, 11:57 AM
He had forwarded me a note from tzvi@galchen.net.
Loc. 1700-1702, added on Sunday, May 17, 2009, 08:29 PM
But I saw Rema all prismatically, all fractured and reconstituted as if seen in the valley of an unshined silver spoon, and actually I’m glad love does that, I shouldn’t complain about love, or love’s perspective—distorted or no, to feel superior to it would be wrong, as if there were some better way of seeing.
Loc. 1717-19, added on Sunday, May 17, 2009, 10:47 PM
although it was an electric teakettle, so instead of a certain trembling there’s a more cavernous gentle rumbling sound, and one waits expectantly for the understated click that means the thermostat has been thrown
Loc. 1964-66, added on Monday, May 18, 2009, 09:33 AM
not in search of what one desires to be true but rather in search of whatever truth there is—then one must be willing to accept, to engage, even to pursue further the most unwelcome and confounding data. One must be willing to make discoveries that shatter one’s most deeply held beliefs.
Loc. 1992-93, added on Monday, May 18, 2009, 09:36 AM
I thought of the last of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a poem I’d once been made to memorize,
Loc. 2462-63, added on Tuesday, May 26, 2009, 09:06 AM
“Everyone’s a butterfly, Dr. Leo,” Harvey said, not even turning from the television set.
Loc. 2539-40, added on Tuesday, May 26, 2009, 09:18 AM
That is to say, a piece of information may be important in some very local sense, but what does it have to do with, as they say, the price of tea in China?
Loc. 2652, added on Tuesday, May 26, 2009, 07:11 PM
She’s a lily of the valley here to see you. A creamy daff of the dill. An atmospheric phenomenon.”
Loc. 2805-6, added on Wednesday, May 27, 2009, 09:28 AM
“Don’t cavil,” I said, and I admit being pleased to use a word that I suspected she would not understand.
Loc. 2841, added on Wednesday, May 27, 2009, 09:54 PM
The ice-cream man would be yelling, ‘Buy a cone and you’ll be happy forever!’”
Loc. 2854, added on Wednesday, May 27, 2009, 09:55 PM
Oddly, in his absence, I only felt closer to him. To everyone, I was feeling closer.
Loc. 2984, added on Thursday, May 28, 2009, 08:45 AM
he says things sometimes like ‘the foul rag and bone shop of my heart’ .
Loc. 2992-93, added on Thursday, May 28, 2009, 08:46 AM
what came to mind was a diagram, with each pronoun a blank box on a language tree, and each possible meaning shifting as I filled in the boxes with different names
Loc. 3081, added on Thursday, May 28, 2009, 08:58 AM
I turned on the TV, very quietly, to stop her mean talk.
Loc. 3166-67, added on Thursday, May 28, 2009, 09:11 AM
In many ways, I’ll realize, this alternate life of mine will be a small but fitting memorial to my life with Rema.