Accismus

Rivka Galchen’s surreal tale of psychiatrist Leo Liebenstein’s search for his missing wife, Rema, is an absolute joy to read. In fact, it’s probably one of my favorite books I’ve read this year.

One day, Rema comes home with a puppy, and Leo immediately realizes that his wife has been replaced by a nearly identical simulacrum. But where did she go, and why, and who is this new person bent on impersonating her? Leo’s determination to recover his true love and crack the mystery of his disappearance takes him to Argentina, to the home of Rema’s estranged mother, Magda, and then to remote Patagonia, with the Doppelganger dogging his every step. Behind all of these strange happenings lurks Tzvi Gal-Chen, the mysterious research meteorologist of the Royal Academy of Meteorology, who has possibly hired Leo to battle the evil 49 Quantum Fathers.

The novel charts one man’s struggle to retain his grip on reality, but really, it is about love — its subjectiveness, its inexplicableness, the ways in which we make it up and find it and lose it and manufacture it again. Galchen’s novel brings to mind Borges and Kafka, but it also reminded me of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Atmospheric Disturbances is hilarious and involving with not a single boring passage, and I highly recommend it.

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(By the way, Galchen is one of those entirely hateable people – she’s an M.D. with an MFA from Columbia, and she looks stunning [and about 25] in her book jacket photo.  Fuck her, am I right?)