Rivka Galchen Interview

liked the book (listen to books on tape) - gave insights into the intelligent crazy mind. good word smith.

too many 'likes' for me to consider reading her, where once i really was. are all young american authors such dolts?

uncanny is an incredibly fitting word to describe this book.
when something familiar becomes unfamiliar it challenges basic assumptions underlying our perceptions of reality. what is familiar is what is known. what happens when you lose that sense of certainty?
atmospheric disturbances is disturbing precisely because it asks this in an incredibly subtle way. beneath skepticism about relationships there is skepticism about the validity of language and knowledge itself.
well done ms. galchen!

I can see someone simply not liking the book, but to attribute to it a pretentiousness seems simply not fitting. It's moving and very humane; there's a great deal of personal suffering that the narrator only lets us glimpse. It's a bravura performance, having confidence that readers will stick with a profoundly unreliable narrator in hopes of getting at something like the truth. Marvelous book, but not for everyone, certainly.

pretentious and narcissistic....much like getting an MD right out of college and immediately getting an MFA in writing....

I agree that this book was pretty much unreadable. It feels desperate, as if the writer had nothing to say but tried to cover it up. I read the NYT review and I'd say the only thing this author has in common with Kafka is the letter K in their names. To each his own, maybe some people like reading this kind of stuff, but it's not art.

the book is sort of, like, you know, similar to this, sort of, inarticulate, unfocused and, like, pretentious interview. I tried to read this novel -- the author had a one-sentence idea but didnt know what to do with it. She seems to think fiction is a narcissistic joyride -- look mom, no hands. There is actually a reader at the other end. I finally gave up on p. 100 because I was like, sort of, you know, bored.

An amazing book, an amazing achievement. The feeling of the uncanny, the being in the mystery, is the experience of reading the book. A more rewarding place to be than reality, at least the reality as I daily experience it.