My dearest fiend: on finally reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Richard Rothwell's portrait of Mary Shelley

There’s that moment which occurs near the halfway point in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when Victor Frankenstein is finally reunited with the monster. Frankenstein has entered university, dazzled his mentors and, in secret, created his artificial man through some unholy marriage of archaic magic and scientific method. He’s fallen ill following the completion of his creation, like a mother weakened by the physical torments of birth. He’s utterly neglected to determine the monster’s whereabouts, and has gradually discovered its capacity for murder. He’s wracked with guilt over having breathed life into the monster’s piecemeal flesh, yet, foreshadowing all that follows, assumes no responsibility for the crimes the monster commits, crimes which Frankenstein, one of the worst parents in Western literature, could arguably have prevented.

The monster’s return is illuminated by a flash of lightning—the same phenomenon at which the 15-year-old Frankenstein marveled so fatefully. It approaches and, to the great shock of those familiar with Boris Karloff’s famously inarticulate manifestation, it begins to speak. “Do your duty towards me,” the monster beseeches his maker, “and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you in peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends… Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed… I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

Theodor von Holst's frontispiece to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

The monster asks Frankenstein to hear his story, and so begins this landmark novel’s most astonishing and moving section, the testament of this eight-foot wretch, who begins his biography by trying to describe the memory of coming into this world fully formed, cognizant and sensitive to basic needs, yet mystified by every new occurrence, and from the start orphaned. He takes to the wilderness, eventually learns to observe and imitate humans, is stirred by music, beauty, and familial love, comprehends the importance of interdependence and the inevitability of disappointment in others, and even educates himself into literacy with the help of volumes of Milton and Goethe. By the time the monster is able to converse with Frankenstein he’s become as eloquent as any character in the novel. This might seem unlikely, even more unlikely than the fact of the monster’s creation, given what we now appear capable of producing nearly 200 years later. But eloquence of any sort can seem unlikely when weighed against the savagery that mankind continues to prove capable of. This novel itself seems unlikely, a succinct, surprising, and imminently durable masterpiece, whose ostensible flaws obey the logic of dream on which the whole is founded, whose epistolary structure of stories within stories within stories reads as so completely modern, and whose magnificence was brought into the world by someone all of 18 years of age.

The draft of Frankenstein

I’m a lot older than 18 and have only now finally gotten round to reading Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus in a handsome hardbound edition (Everyman’s Library, $21), so you’ll have to forgive my rapture. Obviously, I was perfectly aware of Frankenstein’s immeasurable influence, but I somehow failed to anticipate just how fascinating and strange its structure is, how evocative and often poetic its language, and how rich and diverse its themes or motifs, which constitute the region in which Shelley conveyed her highest level of sophistication.

Walton, the Englishman who is ultimately the novel’s only (perhaps unreliable) narrator, seeks adventure and glory in the Arctic, and his letters to his sister speak repeatedly about the preciousness and rarity of friendship—a concern mirrored exactly in the confessions of Victor Frankenstein, whom he encounters during his arduous travels and whose tale he records. Walton longs for the companionship of his sister, and this longing too is mirrored, with more explicit creepiness, in Frankenstein’s story, which iterates again and again Frankenstein’s abiding love for his adoptive sister, to whom he’s inescapably betrothed. And in the story of the monster too these same themes dominate: loneliness, and the desire for a lady companion born of the same fault-laden parentage. (I had no idea that right here in Shelley’s Frankenstein lie the seeds for Hollywood’s Bride of Frankenstein.)

The Bride of Frankenstein

So Frankenstein is a story of absent mothers, ineffectual fathers, men without women. But where this gets really interesting is in Frankenstein’s own participation in his undoing. The monster is the product of Frankenstein’s own hubris, yet it could also be interpreted as a whopper of an excuse for Frankenstein’s perpetuating a fearful avoidance of consummation. If Frankenstein fails to fulfill the not entirely unreasonable requests of the monster—to my eyes the novel’s most sympathetic character—to produce for him a female counterpart, the monster promises to return to ruin Frankenstein’s life precisely on the night of his wedding. What better way to prolong bachelorhood! Frankenstein’s anxiety surrounding marriage is subverted by an act of masculine immaculate conception and the brutal and terrifying incidents that accumulate as a result. There are multiple morals to be gained from Shelley’s tale, and I wonder if among them is something about the immense power of sheer procrastination, which in the hands of the wrong genius can itself prove monstrous.

Witness the sickness: The Killer Inside Me

Lou Ford’s father was a doctor, and though he hides his intellect behind folksy platitudes Lou was more than capable of following dad’s footsteps. But Lou got stuck maybe, as deputy sheriff in the ironically named backwater of Central City, Texas, and as the reluctant betrothed to a local schoolteacher named Amy. The couple “just drifted together like straws in a puddle.” Those are Lou’s words, or rather Jim Thompson’s, whose 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me, one of this infernally gifted author’s most incisive portraits of a doomed and deranged mind, serves as the basis for the same-titled movie from director Michael Winterbottom. Scripted by John Curran with considerable fidelity to its source material, it’s an admirable, slick, horrifying and problematic adaptation, and is now available on home video.

Lou’s sent to run a prostitute named Joyce out of town, but when he delivers the message Joyce attacks him, and a cloud of ice drapes over Lou’s normally placid face. He retaliates with brute force, only to discover that beatings and bondage are Joyce’s cup of tea. They become lovers, but soon Lou gets an idea for a way to exact revenge on a local big shot, an idea that involves murdering both the big shot’s son and Joyce. Killing Joyce is supposed to exorcise “the sickness,” which is how Lou describes his fearsome urge to exact violence on others, women especially—women who love him most especially. But the sickness only spreads and one killing just leads to another, until simple plan slips into apocalyptic parody.

The casting of Casey Affleck as Lou is inspired both for his physicality—Thompson described Lou as lean and wiry, clean-cut, friendly, and 29—and his vocal peculiarity, that voice that creaks like an asthmatic 12-year-old. Affleck was the best thing in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and exhibits similarly creepy nuance and repressed ferocity here. Jessica Alba as Joyce is inspired in a different way. Her supple performance aside, it’s her sweet, heartbreaking smile that helps make it so difficult to witness Lou pounding her face in like a cantaloupe. The killings in The Killer Inside Me are appalling yet somehow detached at the same time, perhaps because Melissa Parmenter and Joel Cadbury’s score is so heavy with portent it takes you out of the moment.

Stunning moments abound, not the least being Lou’s final encounter with Amy, smartly played by Kate Hudson. But there are other issues keeping The Killer Inside Me from being as penetrating as it could have been and more alienating that it probably needs to be. There’s a moment in the novel where Lou explicitly states that he is literally writing what we’re reading, which we ultimately come to realize is deliciously nonsensical. Thompson was a masterful handler of the unreliable narrator, and many of the claims made in Lou’s first-person account become suspect. This is a precarious thing to realize on screen since the imagination is so much more powerful and flexible than the framed, explicit image, particularly when trying to register Thompson's violence. To read it is deeply disturbing; to see it is merely disgusting.

Irreconcilable differences: Rashomon

It gushes off the edges, crashes through the holes where the roof has fallen in, stabs into the puddles and washes across the whole scene in great silvery sheets. The torrential rain at the start of Rashomon (1950) feels nearly apocalyptic, and the grandiose wreck of a city gate where it all takes place does nothing to break up the forbidding gloom. A young priest (Minoru Chiaki) and a middle-aged woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) take shelter there, seated together, not conversing, though through those thick lips encircled by an unkempt beard the woodcutter keeps muttering “I don’t understand…” A third man (Kichijiro Ueda), some guy just trying to get out of the downpour, barges in, starts a fire, gets them talking. He wants to hear a good story, and winds up with four of them, all variations on the same event, none of them matching up. That’s Rashomon, a film so persuasive in its perplexity it’s become an adjective. It won an Oscar, and the Golden Lion at Venice. It introduced Akira Kurosawa to the world—the West especially—and the world watched in fascination despite the film’s refusal to elucidate its central mysteries. It ensured us that our memories are incompatible, but through the movies at least each of them could be true for the time it takes to tell them.

Rashomon has been circulating in a newly restored print. It hits Metro Cinema this coming weekend, a place where Kurosawa’s oeuvre has always found a welcome home over the years and hopefully will for years to come. I’ve seen it more times than almost any other film, and its singular mood never fails to captivate me. An inspired amalgamation of two short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (‘Rashomon’ and ‘In a Grove’), the narrative is a sort of labyrinth, a web of flashbacks within flashbacks, unreliable narrators having their individual narratives re-told by other, only slightly more reliable narrators. Yet it’s terribly entertaining, even while confusing the hell out of you.

So the woodcutter journeys deep into a sun-dappled grove. Just how deep we get a strong sense of from the multitude of angles and compositions granted us by Kurosawa and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, who seemed to prowl through the trees and shrubs and even pointed the camera straight at the sun, a move which dazzled all his contemporaries anxious to find rules to break. Somewhere in this grove the woodcutter finds a lady’s hat, and then a dead body. There’s a trial, where a judge never seen or heard lets elicits testimonies from those connected to the incident, including the alleged killer, a known bandit (Toshiro Mifune, first seen staring into the clouds like a sick animal), the wife of the dead man (Machiko Kyo), and, in an especially chilling sequence, the dead man himself (Masayuki Mori), speaking through a medium and giving no comforting reports from the afterlife. The bandit meets the couple in the woods, tricks the husband, ties him up, and ravishes the wife. This much is basically clear. But what were the circumstances of the husband’s death? A fight? A killing? A suicide?

The performances are each compelling, varying wildly in tone—Mifune almost hysterical in his braggadocio; Kyo wounded, maybe conniving, sliding seamlessly between femme fatale and helpless victim; Mori stoic, pathetic, and in death harrowingly lonely—but united in their synchronized ambiguity. A fourth variation is given that might resolve the contradictions, but even this becomes suspect. The cry of an abandoned baby eventually brings a close to the string of irresolvable storytelling. Some find the baby’s eleventh-hour intervention sentimental, but it strikes me above all as Kurosawa’s way of imparting that life simply goes on, even when the only thing certain is infinite uncertainty. It finally doesn’t matter to us what really happened in the grove that day, and how justice is finally meted out isn’t even mentioned. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in the collective crannies of each of the stories. Everyone has their reasons for telling what they do, so it’s hard to say who to should trust. But if I had to, I’d put my money on the dead man.

Devotion to the sacred Heart of Darkness: novelist Albert Sánchez Piñol journeys back 100 years to reawaken the mystery of the world

Steamship routes circa 1900

The artwork that envelops Penguin Canada’s recent editions of Cold Skin ($18) and Pandora in the Congo ($18) feature spare images that represent distinctive, exotic locations, a lighthouse overlooking a seductively gloomy sea of mist in the first, the talon-like roots of some massive tropical tree in the second. The images loom over the titles, and are cradled in darkness. I wanted to applaud Daniel Cullen’s cover designs because they immediately made me intrigued by this pair of novels from an author I hadn’t heard of, and, most importantly, they did so by evoking something extremely rare in contemporary fiction, promising stories of places in the world still shrouded in shadow, of mysteries lingering within under-explored and little understood landscapes. Which is precisely what these wonderful new books offer us.

Albert Sánchez Piñol

Translated by Cheryl Leah Morgan and now available to English-language readers, Cold Skin, originally published in 2002, and Pandora in the Congo, originally published in 2005, are the first works of Catalan author Albert Sánchez Piñol, a former anthropologist whose fecund imagination feeds upon models from what feels like a very long century ago. Yet somehow his stories read not in slightest like the sort of postmodern pastiche common to other recent incorporations of genre into literary fiction. He’s not subverting older narrative forms so much as shaking them back to life and imbuing them with significance for a new, smaller world. These are serious novels of adventure and strangeness, written with a serious focus on deeply engaging plotting and precise description, and on rendering the fantastical as something chillingly real. The stories, unsurprisingly, are set in the same time period as the sort of popular novels they recall, those of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Joseph Conrad especially. To remind us how mysterious our world can be, how conducive to wild imaginings, Sánchez Piñol takes us back to a moment when even the most technologically advanced and powerful societies were not so confident, and certainly not so convincing, in their claims as to what the rest of the world is made of. I ate it up like candy. Except this candy is nutritious!—it entertains the hell out of you, but also resonates intensely with the frailties of the human psyche and the ongoing precariousness of colonial pursuits.

“We are never very far from those we hate. For this very reason, we shall never be truly close to those we love.” As Cold Skin begins its nameless narrator is about to arrive on the small Antarctic isle where the rest of the novel will take place. He has taken the job of weather observer and is contracted for one year. The rhythms are incantory, guiding us ominously in toward our destination, imparting upon us in just a handful of words great distance and time and arduous travel. “We had our first sighting of the island at dawn. It had been thirty-three days since the dolphins fell away sternward and nineteen since the crew’s breath first expelled clouds of vapour.” The narrator is accompanied by the ship’s captain and some crewmembers to carry his year’s worth of food and books to his new abode. They encounter the only other man on the island, the lighthouse keeper, but he behaves strangely and may have gone insane. Nevertheless the ship needs to continue on its route and leaves the narrator there.

Cold Skin is a short novel, and things get weird fast. The narrator discovers the terrible secret of this lonesome place: a race of amphibious creatures who attack only at night. He’s soon forced to make an uneasy alliance with the lighthouse keeper in order to fend off the creatures. The lighthouse keeper holds one of the creatures captive, a female, whose eerie allure gives the novel its title. Bestiality becomes familiar in this uncivilized place, and jealousy and desire rise up out of the murk. I won’t tell you just where this all goes, though its image-vocabulary, themes and motifs are rich enough to spill over into Sánchez Piñol’s follow-up.

Pandora in the Congo is twice as long as Cold Skin, and while it departs from its predecessor’s lean, claustrophobic approach, it is in many ways more ambitious while still focusing on young, ostensibly pacifist heroes with few attachments—orphans of one sort or another—and adventures in hostile places that engender unsustainable or unattainable strange love. As the First World War looms, Londoner Tommy Thomson makes his first forays into a literary career, albeit of a not very distinguished sort. He becomes a ghostwriter for a crude, racist old bastard, more a brand name than a legitimate author. He makes a pittance and works like a slave to crank out pre-plotted pulp tales of heroic Europeans in savage lands. But a series of coincidental deaths lead Tommy to realize that there are is in fact a longer chain of would-be ghostwriters than he thought, and that he, being the final link, is simply the most deftly exploited: the ghostwriter’s ghostwriter’s ghostwriter’s ghostwriter. He then takes another, seemingly more noble ghostwriting gig, working for a barrister who represents a man accused of double homicide while working as a cook for two aristocratic brothers exploring the Congo with a team of black African slaves who do all the heavy lifting and then some. He’s to interview the accused and novelize his story, the idea being that by making his Congolese adventure into something compelling and sympathetic the barrister will go to trail with the public on the side of his client. It’s in doing these interviews that Tommy’s adventure really begins, though it is very much a kind of adventure by proxy.

Tommy narrates Pandora in the Congo from a perspective of 60 years, though Sánchez Piñol is careful to minimize the editorializing of hindsight, letting us develop our own understanding of how the novel’s complex webs of treachery speak to the modern world. There are exceptions of course, but I’d argue that they enlighten us more than they condescend: “active collaboration in evil was a matter of a concession as simple as holding out your hand… that hand was the essence of the twentieth century.” Culpability is endlessly ambiguous here. Tommy writes hateful trash, but he does so only because he’s employed by the trash’s true author. He later writes a great adventure novel that he only hopes is in the service of a good cause, but he could just as easily be completely deceived. The man whose story Tommy writes—the man has the curious name of Marcus Garvey—commits horrific acts while journeying through the Congo, but he does so under strict orders from the men who employ him. Such moral quandaries only balloon as the plots continues to take its marvelous twists.

Illustration from H.M. Stanley's In Darkest Africa (1890)

Besides the rich white Europeans and poor white Europeans, besides the black slaves being worked to death and the black slaves employed to help exploit their own kind, there is an additional people roped into Tommy’s narrative, an underground race of humanoids who, like the creatures in Cold Skin, quickly become the Other for which violence and domination are deemed the only appropriate response. As in Cold Skin, a female from this race becomes the centre point of a battle between various male desires, including that of our narrator. The novel’s narrative threads are laid out with the caveat that nearly all of them are relayed by someone other than the writer of the words we read. They are interpreted, digested, possibly tainted, possibly lies. Our narrator seems himself to be reliable, but he can only narrate what he’s told. In the end we’re overwhelmed by the impossibility of stories being the creations of a single author, and here is where he catch a glimpse of the philosophy of Sánchez Piñol himself, who openly employs the styles and trajectories of the novels he’s presumably admired. Let’s not get too concerned with tracing or judging the indefinable labyrinth of sources for our tales, Pandora in the Congo implies, but rather surrender to the conviction of the telling we’re given. It may be the only lasting consolation.

Nocturnes: Kazuo Ishiguro's variations on a theme always amabile, rarely animato

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s most widely admired novels, such as The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans or his most recent, Never Let Me Go, memory’s vice grips conspire with some essential inward tendencies within his narrators to gradually reveal intricate discrepancies between the personal story being relayed and the larger story of the world surrounding. Unreliable narrators constitute a well-mined trope in fiction, but Ishiguro has raised it to a highly particular, melancholy art though crisp, concise language, inventive narratives, a sly manipulation of genres as varied as science-fiction and mystery, and, most especially, an unusual willingness to immerse himself so fully into the minds of his protagonists. I’ve pretty much adored everything he’s written, and greatly admired its daring variation, so I guess I’ve set the bar pretty high.

Still, with Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (Knopf, $29.95), Ishiguro’s first story cycle, I began to wonder if the one literary boundary Ishiguro’s genius can’t quite traverse is the one that separates the needs of long-from from the short. The stories in Nocturnes are each perfectly absorbing and worth the relatively brief investment required, but taken either as separate components or as a whole—which is presumably the author’s intention—they never quite ascend to Ishiguro’s established heights of emotional complexity. As with all Ishiguro’s work, these stories—of vagabond third wheels trying to interpret the cryptic tensions that exist between couples; of musicians who never quite make it as big as they’d hoped; of lives in stasis contrasted with lives in upheaval—observe the precariousness of nostalgia and the pitfalls of poor communication with knowingness. The problem might simply be that few of these characters truly come to life so as to make that knowingness resonate deeply.

In ‘Crooner,’ Jan, a cheerful young Polish guitarist living in Venice, plays for tourists on the piazza circuit, one of whom being Tony Gardner, a 60ish, once-famous American vocalist. He asks Jan to play backup during a moonlight serenade for Garnder’s wife Lindy. They discuss strategies for injecting specificity of feeling into one’s performances, cultivating those unuttered mental images that imbue one’s playing with texture. What Jan has in his mind—memories of his mother taking consolation in Gardner’s records during bleak days in Communist Poland—differs greatly with what Gardner has in mind—memories of a marriage that for his wife has essentially been a career move. Jan says of his playing: “I tried to make it sound like America, sad roadside bars, big long highways, and I guess I was thinking of my mother, the way I’d come into the room and see her on the sofa gazing at her record sleeve…” Each is lost in private, disparate reveries, but if Jan’s reverie is slightly clichéd, I can’t say I ever bought into Gardner’s story at all. Like a number of the larger-than-life Americans found in Nocturnes, he feels like a conceit.

Lindy Garder however is more developed, particularly since she’s able to return later in ‘Nocturne,’ the fourth story, which—get this—finds Steve, a struggling Los Angeles saxophonist, agreeing to allow the rich man who stole his wife from him to pay for Steve’s plastic surgery, a dubious effort to help forward the unhandsome session player’s lagging career. Steve winds up spending his post-surgery rest period in the posh hotel where he meets the slightly older, rather convincingly batty Lindy, who’s just gone under the knife for the third or fourth time. There are several moments in Nocturnes where Ishiguro, who mastered a Kafkaesque comic vernacular in his underrated The Unconsoled, strains for laughs. But once Steve and Lindy meet, the both of them traipsing around the hotel in the middle of the night with their heads wrapped in bandages, at one point trying to retrieve a stolen trophy from the bowels of a roast turkey, I have to hand it to Ish: this stuff is pretty hilarious. And it cries out for a younger Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, say, to do the movie version.

But in ‘Come Rain or Come Shine,’ similar hi-jinx are thwarted by an uncertain tone or too much repetition. Middle-aged university pals reunite. They’re so comfortable with each other that they can insult each other and, despite protests to the contrary, insist they know what the other is thinking to increasingly absurd degrees. Basically, they don’t listen to each other. This not listening goes on for a while. Again, Ishiguro holds things together. He never betrays the basic traits with which he’s endowed his protagonist—though he does, rather improbably, have him imitate a dog. But what he has endowed his protagonist and his narrative with here is pretty limited, even for a short story. The more serious ‘Malvern Hills’ is similarly founded in a solid premise—young English guitarist meets long-married Swiss tourists so oblivious to each other they don’t seem to exist on the same planet—that doesn’t arrive at a very satisfying resolution.

Which leaves us with ‘Cellists,’ the collection’s final and in some ways strongest tale, partially because while being written in Ishiguro’s customary first-person, the narrator is telling the stories of other people who remain sufficiently enigmatic as to make us wonder about what really transpired between them and where their paths led them in the shadow years after the story finishes. It concerns Tibor, another talented young musician from another Eastern European country—Ishiguro’s quite sensitive to the distinctive experiences of Eastern Europeans who fall under the spell of Western music—whose taken under the wing of Eloise, another American musical celebrity—or at least that what Eloise advertises herself as. Eloise is a fascinating question mark, existing on this strange frontier where it’s hard to distinguish between what passes as lived-in wisdom and as pure fantasy. Her true nature is fundamentally unknown to us, yet what we do know about her are details so carefully arranged that we leave the story wanting to know more without feeling we’ve been ripped off.

Make mine a double: Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances

This is probably not the right place to talk about how I once saw my own double, many years back, and about the usual trauma such events wreak, but maybe you’ve seen your double, too, or thought you did, or looked for it in a moving crowd reflected in some shop window. In any case you too might harbour some persistent fascination with doubles, especially if you’re a reader of fiction, where they crop up in the damnedest places, generally as harbingers of doom, sometimes as shocked by seeing their supposed original as the supposed original is by them, stunned by that pit-of-your-stomach feeling and that little voice that whispers, “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

In the canonical works of Hoffmann, Dostoyevsky, and Poe, in the great crime fiction of Raymond Chandler, Frederic Brown and Boileau-Narcejac, in contemporary novels and stories from the likes of Haruki Murakami, Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro and José Saramago, doubles loom forbiddingly, (over-)populating a great number of my favourite books. So I confess that when I picked up Rivka Galchen’s debut novel Atmospheric Disturbances (HarperCollins, $29.95), I was sold on the first sentence: “Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.” That was pretty much all it took. That and the strange ink drawings that enveloped the book. But this admittedly thru-the-back-door entry into a book review is my way of trying to impart just how refreshing Galchen’s approach to a certain beloved trope is. Atmospheric Disturbances is much more than a simulacrum of the old double myth. It’s a very sly, and very entertaining spin on the blurring effects of modern life and the heights of panic that afflict those who find themselves troublingly in love.

They tell us that, at the atomic level, we supposedly regenerate ourselves every seven years or so, which means that by middle-age we’ve somehow died and been replaced, or replicated, if you will, about seven times. Somebody says to their spouse, “You’re not the person I married fourteen years ago!” Buddy, you don’t know the half of it. In Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers, the source material for the four and counting film versions, the entire populace of a Marin County town seems to suffer an epidemic that causes everyone to believe their loves ones are actually imposters—which, as it turns out, they are. In Atmospheric Disturbances, 51-year-old New York psychiatrist Dr. Leo Liebenstein finds himself in a similar scenario, yet you get to feeling that there’s probably not any alien and/or communist conspiracy behind it all. You get to feeling that Leo, for all his insight into the mind’s machinations, isn’t seeing things straight, that his own anxiety about love’s instability, about his deservingness of a woman’s love, about the incessant unknowability of others—and perhaps, his unresolved feelings about his parents, now both deceased—is clouding his ability to see Rema, his beautiful, younger, foreign-born wife, for who she is, that all he can see is a döppelganger that doesn’t correlate to his idealized or nostalgic vision.

Galchen’s prose style is concise, humorous, buoyant and inviting, but what really lifts it up off the page and lights the reader’s imagination is how daringly she eschews any of the customary distance from Leo’s apparent neurosis, writing the entire novel in first-person, so that Leo, educated, sober, skeptical and highly reflexive, can speak directly to us in relatively jargon-free language, giving us no privileged perspective. Hardly just another unreliable narrator, Leo so often seems exactly like someone you might rely on under other circumstances, and here comes some near spoilers. It’s why he can so thoroughly convince Harvey, a patient who believes he’s a psychic agent for a meteorological society who takes his orders through hidden messages on page six of The New York Post, that Leo, too, belongs to the same order and communicates regularly with it’s leader, Tzvi Gal-chen, who it turns out actually is a renown meteorologist with some fascinating theories about weather. Or rather, Gal-chen was all of the above. Turns out he died in 1994. Additionally, though it’s not made explicit anywhere in the novel, Gal-chen is also the author’s father, which begs the question, just who can we rely on here? You might be best to place your bets on the double.

Atmospheric Disturbances is funny, perplexing and full of unexpected adventures, including a journey to Patagonia, “the wild, uncultivated unconscious of Argentina,” which in some ways feels like Galchen’s equivalent to Murakami’s Hokkaido. And at certain moments, the novel is tremendously moving. Leo reasons his way through his conviction that the woman who appears to be Rema is not his wife by focusing on the sort of minutia that cohabitating lovers hold dear, and by holding to a predetermined idea of all the little things Rema wouldn’t do. Meanwhile, Rema, or “Rema,” is wont to do whatever she needs to of her own volition, replicated or not, and she tries very hard to follow Leo into his neurotic odyssey and bring him back to safety. Their struggle to cope with alienation and to return to and/or rediscover each other as individuals destined to change in a changing world is at the core of this story that bridges the seeming fantastical with the most ordinary absurdities.

At one point, Leo is communicating with Tzvi Gal-chen—I won’t bother explaining this little phenomenon here, and I don’t think I can, actually—and they begin to discuss Dante and his relationship to the dead in The Divine Comedy. The dead, Gal-chen explains, seem to know everything about the past and perhaps even the future, but nothing about the present, and for such knowledge they turn to Dante. “And that somehow is what being alive is, to be suspended in the present, to be suspended in time.” Atmospheric Disturbances generates some superb storytelling on the basis of this realization, the understanding that we are stuck always in the now, and that taking anything in this life for granted, even the love of that one nearest to us, requires nothing less than a huge, crazy leap of faith.