Leaving the Atocha Station

by Ben Lerner

Paperback, 2011

Library's rating

Publication

Coffee House Press (2011), Editie: 0, Paperback, 186 pagina's

Physical description

186 p.; 14.81 x 1.3 cm

ISBN

9781566892742

Language

English

Collections

Read but unowned, Gelezen in 2014

Description

Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam's "research" becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by? In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle. Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979, Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the recipient of a 2010-2011 Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt M�nster f�r Internationale Poesie. Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel.… (more)

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

User reviews

LibraryThing member fist

I didn't really understand why this story about an American in Madrid received so much praise. Maybe because I found it hard to relate to a drug and alcohol dependent protagonist who is so self-absorbed, yet so little self-aware. It is tiring to read the inner thoughts of a person whose every

utterance, gesture or facial expression is preceded by a strategic thought regarding the desired effect and followed by an analysis whether the intended effect was achieved.
The author successfully describes the experience, not unlike physical jet lag, of building up a life in another language. Everything seems more mysterious, every sentence may have multiple meanings (because you didn't understand all the words and are filling in the blanks), yet conversations do take place - but you're never quite sure how multi-layered they were.
One wonders how well the author really knows Spain and the Spaniards. For sure, no Spanish woman would only eat her first crème brûlée because she was introduced to it by an American - crema catalana, as is is know in Spain, is almost a basic staple. More generally, the author falls into the trap of the Exotic Foreigner, which one hoped had died out in the 19th century with Orientalism. In this exotism, foreign women are mysterious, omniscient, gracious yet sexually available to the narrator (and mutually interchangeable), and males are either magical helpers who look up to the intellectually superior traveller, or castrating, sexually superior alpha males. If the novel had been set in Africa, we wouldn't have heard the end of it, but Spain is fair game for this reductive ethnocentrism, it seems.

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LibraryThing member Eyejaybee

This was probably the most irritating book I have read this year, and if weren't for the fact that I had a train journey to complete and no other book to read I would not have bothered to finish it.

Adam Gordon is, by his own admission, a fraud. Funded by a charitable foundation to undertake

research in Madrid on the impact on the arts of the Spanish Civil War, he is actual following his own dream, which seems principally to revolve around attempts to be a poet. I found the first few pages vaguely amusing but by the time I reached Page 20 I was desperately hoping for a tangential shift whereby the Madrid Chapter of the Hell's Angels meted out the damn' good chain-whipping that Gordon so richly deserved.

This book will move with near-record speed from the shelf on the bookstore to my pile for consignment to the local charity shop.

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LibraryThing member john.cooper

Adam, the narrator and sole consciousness through whom everything in this book is filtered, is slumming through a life of privilege. Ivy educated, fairly recently post-grad, he's on an expenses-paid poetry fellowship in Madrid, although he admits on page 3 that he's never been moved by any poem,

much less any piece of art, and the fragments we see of his own poetry are terrible. His fellowship is to write a major poem regarding the impact of the Spanish civil war on contemporary literature, but he's not working on it. Instead, he's stumbling through each day on a diet of marijuana and tranquilizers and coasting on the good will of his acquaintances. None of them know him very well, because he lies to them. He lies to manipulate how they feel about him, he lies to test out how he feels about something, and sometimes he just lies because it's the easiest choice in the moment.

I take issue with people who dismiss a book because they don't like the main character—I don't read literature to find friends, I read in hopes that life will become a little more illuminated. The trouble here is that living through Adam's thoughts quickly becomes claustrophobic and exasperating. His self-centeredness is not the problem: the problem is his refusal to engage. There is no growth in this story, much less a journey. He just coasts to the end, unconsciously confident that his parents and the benevolent authorities who are paying his way will continue to find a way for him, one way or another. And unlike in greater first-person novels with a naive protagonist, there's no tension between what the protagonist knows and what we as readers know. If only there were something to like about our hero! Unfortunately, his prose is sometimes so monotonous that it can read like a court transcript. "I rolled a spliff and asked her if she wanted any and she said no and I lay in bed smoking while she sat at the little table in the corner and worked on the translations, opening my notebook and hers. I asked her if she wanted to read me some and she again said no. I didn't understand her method. She had no dictionary and asked no questions and I wondered if she was translating at all. After a while she came to bed and shut her eyes and I tried in my clumsy way to initiate some contact but she was totally if somehow gently unresponsive and soon she was asleep." So was I.

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LibraryThing member lxydis

started off promisingly, well written and evocative, but soon became tediously solipsistic.

LibraryThing member tinasnyderrn

While I found this book to be somewhat enjoyable, it is not one I would read a second time. I feel that the storyline was good but the reading itself was too narrative for my taste. I like a book with more dialogue and less narrative. For those who do like a book with a lot of narrative though,

this one would be a good choice. The storyline flows smoothly, I just wish there had been more dialogue in this one as I have a hard time "getting to know the characters" when they aren't speaking much. You definitely getting a good sense of the main character but I'm disappointed in the other characters in the book. Overall, not bad, though.

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LibraryThing member lg4154

I won this book on Library Thing member giveaway and I really did not like it. The main character, Adam is a poetry student living in Spain. As I was reading this, I kept loosing interest with it and it never did get better for me.

LibraryThing member bostonbibliophile

Moody, style-driven novel about a student living on a fellowship in Spain, writing poetry, doing drugs and negotiating relationships with women. It's told in the first person by Adam, the student, and covers his adventures and his thoughts about literature, politics and life. The 2004 Madrid

bombings occur during his stay; he's a witness, though the events don't seem to shake him up very much. I enjoyed the book as the self-consciously literary prose poem it is but it's short on plot and is more a series of reflections and moods and less a narrative, although the character does narrate a certain period in his life. Lerner does a nice job capturing the experience of being an American living abroad, the sense of alienation, the sense of detachment and foreign-ness that comes with living on the periphery of a place and a group of people. Adam tries to ingratiate himself into the local literary scene, something that only happens by chance as he attaches himself to a group of strangers at a bar who turn out to be artists, writers and gallery people. Through it all he never loses his sense of separateness and it's this that's communicated so beautifully to the reader.

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LibraryThing member storian

The narrator gives us beautifully phrased and subtle observations of his inner state, which is clouded, or perhaps clarified, by hashish, psychiatric meds and other drugs. The motives of others and the state of things around him remain mysterious. The randomness of events in the story and the

self-absorption of the narrator tried my patience at times, but I stuck with it because of the author's eye for detail and gift for capturing states of mind in prose. I'm glad I did. Our hero seems to have learned something by the end.

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LibraryThing member Capybara_99

Often funny closely observed novel about an American poet in his 20s in Madrid on a fellowship, enacting in his life -- through pills, hash, drink, youth, foreignness and incompetence at the language -- his understanding of what a poem is: "the failure of language to be equal to the possibilities

it figures."

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LibraryThing member jorgearanda

A light novel about the artistic process and the dishonesty inherent in building up an artistic reputation.

LibraryThing member Hebephrene

Adam our fraudulent self hating anti hero has earned a grant to study in Spain. Ostensibly he is supposed to be working on a project about the impact of the Spanish Civil War on poetry but he knows this is part of the fraud, that and the fact that he claims he is a poet to the outside world. In his

world, which we occupy in excruciating detail, he is busy parsing his various deceptions. He is phony with everybody including the two women in his life. This is a sly smart book and the main character's capacity for withering introspection and dissection of his false front are hilarious and sickening. There is a wonderful piece on page 164 where he examines his pretense as an aesthetic theory of poetry - and thus the conceptual core of the book. We are in the age of American narcissism here and Lerner has taken it to a new scathing level. And yet it is redeemed because of Adam's very human vulnerability and his awareness that he is a fraud. However while the title ties the book to the horrendous bombings in Madrid, little is made of it, as little as is made of the other political aspect - the Spanish Civil War - and so you wonder if there wasn't a bigger book that dealt with the intersection of politics and poetry that got cut. The amputation is too obvious. Also the thing dies on the vine at the end. But still one of the better fictional books of last yea

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LibraryThing member tippycanoegal

I loved this book and found it darkly hilarious. Lerner's complicated and difficult narrator cracked me up in much the same way as Lucky Jim did in my favorite Kingsley Amis novel. He just can't quite pull it together and his experience in Spain is a riot of misunderstandings and mishaps. Lerner

does a wonderful job of conveying the difficulty of communication in a language that one does not quite speak.

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LibraryThing member Samchan

In Leaving the Atocha Station, we follow poet Adam Gordon around Spain where he's on a fellowship and so, in theory, is conducting research for a new poem he’s going to write. In reality, he’s mostly thinking, reading, smoking spliffs, popping pills, occasionally going out with his Spanish

friends, and lying to them to seem cooler and smarter. Through the wanderings and meditations of this wry, unreliable, emotionally-numb character, the novel touches on issues like identity and authenticity, engaging with the world and life, the passage of time, and the relationship between a person and art. That last theme is one that resonated the most with me—well, that and the soothing, smooth flow of the prose. Even when I found my mind drifting a bit away from whatever Adam was doing in a given scene, Lerner’s sentences "caught" in my brain somehow. I kept jotting down huge chunks of quotes that don't just sound beautiful, but that strike at the heart of all these issues in ways I hadn't imagined before on my own.

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LibraryThing member poolspy

the first 2 pages are really good

LibraryThing member bluepigeon

It's been a while since I read a book with such an unlikable main character, and liked it. Perhaps Lerner has reached out and brought forth all the condensed unlikelable-ness inside himself, or perhaps he has forged this character out of the bits and pieces of all the people he knows; no matter

what his method, it is a complete piece of work, this man.

There is not much to the plot, except to say that it is, as others have said, meta-meta-meta of something, which I probably would be able to pretend to not be able to describe in minute and precise detail with beautiful language, but actually do a pretty good job of it only in its whole beauty in my head after my morning coffee and shit and joint, and only if I WERE a poet, you get me? You get it, you get it. (If you don't, that's probably because i am not a poet wo is pretending not to be a poet who is pretending to be a poet who is.......)

In Lerner's book, I saw many of the annoying German and English grad students who would wear only black skinny jeans (before skinny jeans were cool! bah!) and stand around smoking in the NJ cold throwing dirty looks at other people, thinking only of Kant or Hegel, which always made me want to 1) annoy them by bringing up Kant or Hegel, whichever one they didn't like, 2) shake them, and 3) ask why, if they were going to only care about philosophy, they were doing a degree in literature.

I am not sure what to make of the Spaniards in the book; I trust Lerner was well informed form his own experiences.

Lerner certainly brings up some interesting points throughout the book; to be a stranger in a language, to be a stranger in a crowd, to be someone pretending to be someone and then to pretend you pretended because you wanted to be free, and to be an American in a post-terror-attack in Madrid... Though I still wonder why his main character had to be so unlikable.

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LibraryThing member freelancer_frank

This is a book about being young. The narrator, who is not endearing, displays all the self-absorption, lack of concern and misapprehension that one remembers from ones own youth. Layered over this is a glimpsed appreciation of art, a yearning for greater immersion in the world and a constant worry

about authenticity. The book has some originality and is a reasonably absorbing read.

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LibraryThing member icolford

Ben Lerner's debut novel is an often very funny chronicle of a young American writer living and working in Spain on a poetry fellowship. Adam Gordon's project proposal has been accepted by the fellowship awards committee and he finds himself in Madrid, in the period leading up to the March 2004

national elections, where he is expected to produce work of publishable quality. Instead of working diligently on his poetry however, he drifts from one day to the next partying with new friends, falling in love and getting high. In the wake of the March 11 train bombings, he begins to suspect that he is a fraud and that poetry itself is an exhausted medium. Can poetry influence political outcomes? Does an ignorant young American with no life experience have any right to comment on Spanish politics? These are questions that he grapples with as he entertains serious doubts with regard to both his talent and his aesthetic intentions. To his amazement, however, the work he produces is taken seriously by the very people whose opinions matter the most. Adam's voyage of self-discovery through Spanish culture frequently goes off the rails, and Ben Lerner's prose--steeped in irony--seems to call into question the validity of all art. Leaving the Atocha Station is a comic novel for the serious reader; or, to put it another way, it is a serious novel with a comic vibe that challenges the reader to consider art in new ways. It is also vastly entertaining and nothing less than a triumph.

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LibraryThing member Opinionated

I found myself enjoying this book almost despite myself. The protagonist, Adam Gordon, is a young American poet on a scholarship in Spain. He is lonely, disconnected, and insecure, and thinks of himself as a fraud. He spends his days smoking hash, taking anti depressants and wondering if he will

ever have a "profound experience of art". And any reader who has ever found himself alone in a foreign country without friends or urgent purpose will relate to some of this, regardless of the pills or the hash

But then he is rescued by the artistic Antonio, and his angelic and accomplished sister Teresa. Why they should want to do this is unclear. Antonio wants to publish Adam's poems, which Adam implies are basically fraudulent in the sense that they dont "mean anything" but are just confections of words. From the samples he provides I would tend to concur. Teresa wants to translate them. Both of them want to launch and mentor Adam into Spanish artistic circles and are endlessly patient of his social ineptitude, incompetence and capacity to embarass himself .

Adam acquires a girlfriend, Isabel, it is not clear how. In fact everything about Isabel is unclear - no physical description of her is ever provided other than she wears her hair in a scarf. She also wants to take Adam under her wing, and show him her Spain. Its not clear, at least to Adam, whether she really cares for him and he makes a series of misjudgements on the assumption that she does not

The Atocha station bombings happen and Adam can only observe them as an outsider he doesn't really feel any impact. He pursues Teresa romantically, but its not clear whether his feelings are reciprocated, whether Teresa tolerates his romantic designs as part of her mentoring role, whether she is waiting for him to be more assertive, or whether, as an angel, she is simply inscrutable.

What Lerner seems to want to say is that understanding a foreign culture is simply impossible however well you speak a language. Adam's Spanish is clearly good, if not perfect. But his lack of perfect understanding and his feeling that he is seeing everything through a clouded filter (plus the hash and the tranqs) causes him to be uncertain, nervous and paranoid

Seeing Spain through Adam's eyes, I too was uncertain about a number of things. Does Isabel really care? What on earth does she see in this wastrel? Are his poems any good? Do they just work better in Spanish? What is Teresa's motivation? What does Antonio see in him? Or are they just kind people being nice to a lonely foreigner?

So I enjoyed the book, despite wanting to slap Adam every 5 pages.

As a secondary point, I note the book has been translated into Spanish and can't help wondering how a book about not understanding Spanish, translates into Spanish,,,

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LibraryThing member Paulagraph

Oddly charming in his puerile self-absorption (he is nothing if not solipsistic) the poet / protagonist Adam Gordon bumbles around Madrid (and very briefly Granada & Barcelona) on a one year literary "research" fellowship. That his first name is Adam is not coincidental, as he experiences his

surroundings as if he were the prematurely weary (& always anxiously on the verge of a panic attack) first-man. That the novel brings to mind the Euro film, L'auberge espagnole is not surprising considering both feature a gauche & almost consistently inebriated leading man, spending a year abroad in Spain. In fact, the level of substance use in the novel recalls that earlier American novel set in Spain, Hemingway's iconic The Sun Also Rises. Mind altering substances have been updated here to include not only copious quantities of alcohol & nicotine, but also hashish, pot & anti-anxiety, anti-depressive prescription medications (little white & little yellow pills). Instead of the Spanish Civil War (eternally in the background) Leaving Atocha Station takes place in the early days of the American invasion of Iraq & encompasses the terrorist bombing at Atocha Station in March, 2004. Although the Spaniards he interacts with seem to be able to correctly gauge Adam's talent, credibility & fluency in a second language, he himself is plagued with self-doubt & insecurity, which push him to concoct elaborate lies about his parents, his project (the phases of which mark both the passage of time & the development of the narrative), his affections & his intentions. He is alternately staying in Spain indefinitely or returning to the United States to pursue a more sober life of respectability & responsibility. At times, Adam is almost buffoonish in his ability to misstep, to not-have-a-clue. His disarray is hilariously shown in peak performance during a "lost" day in Barcelona, a day in which, on a quest for a simple cup of coffee, he gets truly & incredibly lost after leaving the hotel where he is staying with his friend, colleague & would be lover Teresa. Along the way, there is much musing on art, literature (particularly poetry, although Adam reads Tolstoy & Ashbery concurrently) history, friendship & love, all knotted together as if by a hydra-like umbilical cord.

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LibraryThing member berthirsch

Book Review-Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

An aspiring, self-doubting poetry student travels to Madrid, Spain for a one-year fellowship. His proposed work is to create poetry that reflects the Spanish Civil War. The expectation is that he does intensive academic research yet, in reality,

he spends most of his days prowling the galleries of The Prado, walking the streets, studying Spanish and translation, and hanging out with well to do artists and gallery owners. A loner, at heart, he lives most days in his own head observing his own thoughts and those imagined of others he interacts with, fearing that he may be exposed as a charlatan.

There are some nice set pieces on “the profound experience of art”, the difficulty of grasping a new language and translating poetry from English to Spanish and his “inability to grasp or be grasped by the poem.”

We follow our American student as he holes up in his attic apartment on the Plaza de Santa Ana, explores the Las Letras, Chueca, Retiro and Salamanca barrios, and takes overnight trains to first Granada, and then Barcelona. For those readers who have travelled these paths it is easy to envision his steps as he moves from one event to the next.

While there, he involves himself with two women: Isabel, a teacher at the language school he attends whom he inadvertently embarrasses, and Teresa a stylish bon vivant who translates his work into Spanish and assists in helping him become better known as an up-and-coming voice.

On March 11th, when a terrorist bomb explodes at the Atocha Station the mood and intensity of the settings shifts. The citizens of Madrid go out on massive demonstrations and we see political and social impacts unfold.

This is a fast-moving short novel that introduced Ben Lerner to the reading public. I have also read his recent The Topeka School which also has autobiographical aspects; Lerner has succeeded, much like Philip Roth, in characterizing his own persona in an exploration of the psychological and creative realms of life.

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LibraryThing member CarrieWuj

Quirky and funny because of it, this book gave me some food for thought about the nature of art and its impact on those who engage. This is the central question for Adam Gordon, a poet on a fellowship in Madrid, who veers between being a complete impostor (he can barely speak Spanish!) and an

innocent who wants to understand the nature of his gift. Unfortunately, he often (over) self-medicates with pot, alcohol and tranquilizers, so his experience isn't exactly authentic. He avoids his fellowship committee (the impostor problem) and acquires a group of native friends and lovers and finds himself in some challenging situations which he mostly bumbles through with his poet's detachment. An interesting commentary on our times (set in 2004) and the world's uncertainty - the trains station bombing in Madrid is a scene, but mostly a coming-of-age story for the new millennium.

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LibraryThing member arewenotben

Starts out well but a real struggle after halfway through.

LibraryThing member boredgames

typifies white male privilege and assurance but is so intelligent and unusual that i was in awe of the writing.

LibraryThing member albertgoldfain

Enjoyable read. Blends the sincerity and parody in the life of a young pretentious poet.

LibraryThing member alexrichman

Had steered clear due to the premise - story of precocious poet in Spain, written by a prize-winning poet who, er, spent time in Spain - but this is actually a very funny book. Savagely satirises exactly the sort of privilege and hubris I feared it would be full of.

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