For those of you who love oddball fiction as much as I do, you might enjoy these two novels I’ve recently read:

Rivka Galchen’s first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, is not only a fine literary work, but reading it is a quietly and distinctly paranoid experience. In the very first scene, the main character, Leo, a 51 year-old psychiatrist, is certain that his wife Rema has been replaced with an exact replica, a simulacrum, and he spends the rest of the novel trying to figure out who has done this and why. Whether he ever gets any straight answers is open to interpretation. Is there really a secret society called the Royal Academy of Meteorology involved in a clandestine weather-control war against the devious 49? Is the brilliant but dead meteorologist Tzvi Gal-Chen really communicating with Leo through his Blackberry? And how does the dog fit in? Sound nuts? You make the call. The book delves into some interesting philosophical questions about life, death, and our relationship to reality. Galchen is also disturbingly funny at times and seems frighteningly tuned in (especially or a woman) to the squishy ground of male insecurities and relationship fears. As I was reading this book, I was equal parts unsettled, amused, and impressed. This novel will hang with you. Highly recommended.

Of further interest…

You Tube book trailer for Atmospheric Disturbances. Very cool. I wish someone had done something like this for my novels!

In Death and the Penguin we are introduced to Viktor Zolotaryov, a passably good writer who can’t get published. Viktor finds a job for a meager salary writing obits for the newspaper. Or maybe the job finds him. The twist is that he is writing obits of people who have not yet died. His boss is the kindly but mysterious chief editor, Igor. This quirky novel by Andrey Kurkov (translated from the Russian by George Bird) is set in the Ukraine, where secretive politics is the rule not the exception, and we slowly begin to realize that Igor and the newspaper and the job Viktor has taken are not as innocent as they first appeared. Things start to get strange and dangerous for Viktor when the the subjects of the obits begin turning up dead, and Viktor finds himself in the middle of an odd game of espionage and hide-and-seek. Is somone stalking him or not? Does someone want to kill him or protect him? And what is to be made of his boss’s cryptic comments? This book is not by any means a spy thriller or a suspense novel. The story is a slow-moving ship that seems to be on an inevitable course of destruction as soon as it leaves shore. Viktor is introspective and filled with angst about his writing and the meaning of life and death in the freezing Ukraine. His pet, the penguin Misha (adopted from the zoo and chronically depressed), is the only one Viktor seems in the least bit fond of, human connection being elusive throughout the novel. The book jacket claims the story is in the tradition of Mikhail Buglakov, but this is simply not true, at least in the literary sense. You won’t find any of Buglakov’s wild imagination or dangerous social satire here. But this book is stark, dry, cold, and clever, and for those of us who love to write and appreciate the writer’s struggle there is much for us here. Recommended.

Of further interest…

A terrific interview with Andrey Kurkov.

“It took me only several months to write the novel. The problem is that half of my character, especially Viktor in Death and the Penguinand Tolya, they are typical post-Soviet young intelligentsia lads who were very infantile. I mean, they were semi-dissident in the Soviet time, but they inherited genetically all this Soviet passivity, lack of initiative and readiness to accept anything that comes. So, for me, he is quite typical, representative of this generation. But I should say that this generation has gone already, and the new young people are completely different; they’re very practical, they’re very pragmatic. In his case…in the Soviet time, people like this (including me) were spending hour and hours every day in the cafes just talking about philosophy, Hemingway, jazz and things like that.”