"Peculiarity is something true rumpling the bedsheets of assumption"

"Forget about forecasting; even nowcasting is near impossible."

The ending made me so sad. Everything just disintegrated. It made me sad for all the relationships I'd ever had where we ended up not understanding each other. That is: all the relationships.

Atmospheric Disturbances, by Rivka Galchen, is full of atmosphere and also full of disturbances. The disturbances range from the small linguistic oddities that our narrator finds so endearing and bothersome about his wife, to cumulative cumulus effects on my psyche, such that I wonder if any person is the same person one moment to the next and all attempts to ever know anyone are doomed.

What was it that poetic charlatan Lacan said, something about how because we only see ourselves in mirrors we come to know ourselves "in the fictional direction"?

This book holds a mirror up to the reader for me to identify my own fictional direction, to know the narrative I call my life. That is, it got under my skin and affected me deeply.

Leo, a psychiatrist, is quite clearly a little bit completely crazy when he proclaims that his wife Rema has disappeared (of her own volition or possibly kidnapped) and that the woman in his apartment, in his bed, who looks like her and talks like her is an imposter, a simulacrum, a doppelganger, who may or may not be aware of her role as a fake. The longer he observes her, the clearer it is that she is displaying learned behaviour in an effort to pass as the original. Leo is an unreliable narrator extraordinaire.

Slowly Leo reveals the backstory of their life together. Rema is much younger than he is and a recent immigrant from Argentina.

I thought about saying something about Borges, but I know that I have a problem with coming off as pretentious, and I was worried that bringing up Borges might appear showy, even though every introverted schoolboy reads Borges, so it's rather ambiguous what such a reference would or should indicate. Another reason I generally don't like to mention Borges is because often a response will be to the effect of he has no emotion, and I hate hearing that said, because it is so wrong, and it's not a discussion that I like to get into. In retrospect I know that Rema would have agreed with me, but back then, I wanted to protect Rema from saying anything that might make me not like her.

There's a lot of second-guessing involved in how he relates to her. And there are a lot of gaps, both in what they know of each other, and what Leo chooses to share with us. Things may or may not be given the importance they deserve.

Meanwhile, one of Leo's patients has gone missing from the hospital. Harvey has a "conflict with the consensus view of reality"; he believes he can control the weather and works as a secret agent for a meteorological society who oppose a group known at the 49 Quantum Fathers who profit from investments based on weather fluctuations across parallel worlds.

And as I spoke — my gaze fixed on the stain on Harvey's shirt — I further estranged myself from myself, so that while one part of me talked to Harvey, another part thought about a certain shade of pale green that happened to be the exact shade of pale green that the newspaper once published as having been calculated by astronomers to be the color of the universe, after which a correction appeared in the following week's paper stating that a math error had been made, and that the astronomers now realized the universe, if you could stand outside of it and see it, was actually a shade of beige. (Willed depersonalization is entirely normal, a valid, even laudable, coping technique. Only unwilled depersonalization would be a cause for concern.)

Rema had encouraged Leo to encourage Harvey in his "delusions"as a way of controlling his behaviour. (Maybe she's gone off in search of Harvey on her own.)

It's all a bit mind-bendy. Leo goes to Argentina and discovers things about Rema's past from her mother. He encounters another Rema — but is it the original, or the copy, or a different copy? Leo goes to Patagonia to help Harvey with his work.

Two details jumped out at me, to which I can't find any reference in the published reviews. First, a child's jack under the fridge. Second, the fact, learned in passing and mentioned only the one time, that Rema had had an ectopic pregnancy, about which she'd been very calm. Both these things point to a child that never was, or was and then wasn't. The kind of thing that could break a marriage, or colour it.

There's something else going on in this novel about everyone's relationship to their father, how they forgot to mention that they did or didn't have one.

We don't tell people everything. Not even those closest to us. Maybe we would be crazy to do so.

And yet we blame each other for failing to see each other as we are.

I hate that feeling, of having a feeling within me that just vibrates but that has nowhere to go, like sound in a vacuum, never being received.

Excerpts
NPR: 1. On a temperate stormy night
Tablet: 3. What may be highly relevant
Guernica: 13. We exchange words, not pleasures

Review.