“I’m not saying [homosexuality] is the only sin that’s out there. We have murder. We have all sorts of sin. We have adultery. And we don’t make laws making those legal, and we would never think to make murder legal.”
~ Colorado state senator Scott Renfroe, during debate on health care benefits for same-sex partners
Seriously?
…in case you were wondering. It’s not the one I bought (because of price), but if all you want is the best space heater out there, give it a shot.
Another of those books that I heard about randomly somewhere, bought because it sounded about my speed, and didn’t get around to reading for six months. When I finally started, though, it took a grand total of a day and a half get through (including most of a Saturday), which I suppose isn’t terribly surprising, given that it weighs in at a whopping 240 pages soaking wet. In it, fifty-something New York psychiatrist Leo Liebenstein realizes one afternoon that the young, beautiful Argentinean woman who looks, sounds, and acts in every way like his wife is inexplicably and unmistakably not his wife. With the help of a twenty-six-year-old schizophrenia patient of his who believes he can control the weather and the mysterious, unseen meteorologist Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen, Dr. L sets off on a quest to find out what has happened to his wife and why she has been replaced by the disturbingly identical “simulacrum” who now shares his apartment.
Who will like this book? Hard to say. Anyone who is a fan of Haruki Murakami, I would guess (though I wouldn’t call it magical realism, and it’s decidedly lighter-weight), and like Murakami, it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Anyone for whom philosophy, particularly epistemology, is a hobby. Anyone who is hopelessly smitten with logic and deductive reasoning, and who realizes with a bittersweet tinge the limits and dangers it can pose when it comes to human minds, emotions, and relationships. Anyone whose interest is piqued by existentialism, but doesn’t take it too seriously. Anyone who is fascinated by the juxtaposition of the intensely logical with the eerily, pathologically mad, and who delights in finding some kind of logic, any kind, in what is inherently and inarguably illogical. [If you studied psychology in college and found yourself inexplicably curious about disorders like schizophrenia, multiple personalities, or depersonalization, this might be you.] Anyone who’s a fan of Salvador Dali, Jorge Borges, or Einstein on the Beach. Anyone who loves a mystery, and loves an ambiguous, surreal, unresolved mystery even more.
And anyone who finds sentences like the following amusing, rather than frustrating:
“This simulation of there being two observers looking at the same problem (my life) without there actually being two observers—echoes—though I didn’t realize it at the time—the solution that Tzvi came to in his research into single-Doppler radar retrieval methods.”
“I had overestimated Magda’s ability to account for the redshift of her own desires, to account for Dopplerganger effect; I had miscalculated the internal error of the other observer I was observing.”
“The truth of the matter was that the matter between us happened not to be the matter between us—that is, whatever problems we actually suffered within our own marriage were absolutely irrelevant to what was currently keeping us apart.”
So who will like Atmospheric Disturbances? Maybe you. Or not. But if any of the above resonates and you’ve got a couple of days to kill, you might give it a shot. 