I have to blog about several García Márquez´s, Brave new world and Animal farm (that I remember).
But I will leave those for later. Today I´m blogging about Atmospheric disturbances, by Rivka Galchen. (If you don´t like my "review", this is a link to The New York Times Book Review - And I hate American/English use of brackets; I´d never write this this way in Spanish...)
First of all, as an introduction or something like that...
I had run out of books to read, and I still had a whole week left in NY, plus the flight back to Spain... So I went to The Strand (where books are loved) with the intention to pick something in Spanish. I did - Time must have a stop, by A. Huxley, in progress - but then I saw this book on one of the desks. I had seen it many times before (it was in a very visible place - just like The lord of the flies, I´ve seen that one like 2983456 times!!) and it had never got my attention. Rather, it had, but I would just think it was probably one of those stupid pseudo-sci-fi books for nerds or for casual not very committed readers. I don´t know why that day I had an impulse to take it and read the cover:
"When Dr. Leo Liebenstein´s wife disappears, she leaves behind a single confounding clue: a woman who looks, talks, and behaves exactly like her. A simulacrum. But Leo is not fooled, and he knows better than to trust his senses in matters of the heart. Certain that the real Rema is alive and in hiding, he embarks on a quixotic journey to reclaim her. With the help of his psychiatric patient Harvey—who believes himself to be a secret agent able to control the weather—his investigation leads him from the streets of New York City to the southernmost reaches of Patagonia, in search of the woman he loves. Atmospheric Disturbances is a witty, tender, and conceptually dazzling ( Booklist ) novel about the mysterious nature of human relationships."Despite this description of a kind of girly story, and despite the list of six excellent critics (I tend to distrust a book that displays a list of nice critics), and despite one of the female critics calling it an "exquisite first novel" (I tend to distrust even more a book written by a woman and displaying a list of nice critics all written by women - which was not the case though), I opened the book and read the first lines:
Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife. [This first line is already a great one, I think.] This woman casually closed the door behind her. In an oversized pale blue purse—Rema’s purse—she was carrying a russet puppy. I did not know the puppy. And the real Rema, she doesn’t greet dogs on the sidewalk, she doesn’t like dogs at all. The hayfeverishly fresh scent of Rema’s shampoo was filling the air and through that brashness I squinted at this woman, and at that small dog, acknowledging to myself only that something was extraordinarily wrong.
She, the woman, the possible dog lover, [this, "the possible dog lover", is what made me decide to buy the book] leaned down to de-shoe. Her hair obscured her face somewhat, and my migraine occluded the edges of my vision, but still, I could see: same unzipping of wrinkly boots, same taking off of same baby blue coat with jumbo charcoal buttons, same tucking behind ears of dyed cornsilk blonde hair. Same bangs cut straight across like on those dolls done up in native costumes that live their whole lives in plastic cases held up by a metal wire around the waist. Same everything, but it wasn't Rema. It was just a feeling, that's how I knew.
So, synopsis, my style:
The narrator is a 50-something years old American psychiatrist, married to a young and charming Argentine woman, who (the psychiatrist) unconvinced follows the wife´s suggestion to pretend to be a secret agent from the Royal Academy of Meteorology, for which one of his patients thinks he (the patient) is working with his special ability to control atmospheric events. This is what we get to know after reading a few pages. But the first thing we know, the central story of the novel, is that the psychiatrist´s wife has misteriously dissapeared and been impersonated by an exact replica of hers, a woman the narrator calls "the simulacrum". And, apart of the fact that he doesn´t know where she is, or even if she has left by her own will or instead she´s been taken, apart of the fact that he doesn´t know the reason of her disappearing or whether she will come back or not, what is most disturbing is the fact that nobody seems to notice the difference, not even the simulacrum herself. From his perspective of a psychiatrist, he of course acknowledges that he could be taken by a fool, but he obviously is not, and he gives us rational proof. Also, after getting a misterious call from the Royal Academy of Meteorology, which might be related to Rema´s disappearing, he starts digging and reading some papers by Tzvi Gal-Chen, the meteorologist he and Rema invented for his patient and who he is supposed to be working for, according to their fake story. And it turns out, the papers might subtly reveal some clues about Rema´s possible location:
The first author: Tzvi Gal-Chen.
The paper was originally presented at a conference in Buenos Aires.
Buenos Aires being Rema´s hometown.
And Tzvi Gal-Chen being Tzvi Gal-Chen.
And the article was about retrieval. Specifically: "Retrieval of Thermodinamic Variables Within Deep Convective Clouds: Experiments in Three Dimensions."
My pulse rose. My fingers went cold. Then the light went out; I crawled along the shelving to turn it back on. I know the ordinary often masquerades as the extraordinary, that if you put thirty people together in a room, the likelihood that two have the same birthday is over ninety percent, that when you learn a new word and it then seems suddenly ever present it is only because you have just begun to notice what was there all along. (This once happened to me with the word cathect. Also Rosicrucian.) Maybe that´s all that this find of mine was. For all I know, maybe Tzvi Gal-Chen and Buenos Aires were both already pervasive terms and I´d simply stumbled accross two examples of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. But the fitting together of so many elements—sometimes that really happens, a stray orange peel, a necklace, and a certain joke about iceberg lettuce once converged to reveal a girlfriend´s infidelity—convinced me that I was perceiving something real, that I was not myself in any way cracked, that only my world suddenly was.
This book is, indeed, a very good first novel (I wouldn´t say exquisite, but it is good). The author herself is a doctor, so she knows her stuff, but she also talks a lot about meteorological science, which proves that she did some additional research. She uses (the psychiatrist uses) such an analytical and somewhat scientific languages that for moments you get to believe that the simulacrum is just a simulacrum, you think "ok, I know this is not possible, but what if...?"
Which takes us to the matter of the beauty of literary language.
No one would say the text in this book is beautiful, no one would call this a beautiful story. It´s a smart story with brilliant phrases and brilliant whole paragraphs written just the way the psychiatrist reasons. And yet you can tell that the words, the prases, the speech, are carefully chosen with the purpose of making it believable, enjoyable and addictive.
And here´s what I think:
I don´t think a literary work must be necessarily beautiful. I don´t think the story must serve the beauty of the language, but the language must serve the story. This is not a story that could have been written with pompous grandiloquent words.
And one of the hardest aspects of writing a novel (not that I know though) is being able to choose the language that best suits the story you´re telling.
Anyways. I really enjoyed the reading, it made me think (also about things other than the story itself), it was a very good sample of a first novel, and it made me want to read 240 pages of English.
