Leaving the Atocha Station

An American poetry student receives a one-year fellowship to write about the Spanish Civil War. He travels to Madrid, where he spends most of his time in a drug-and-alcohol-induced haze rather than completing his academic project. He visits The Prado and other galleries and museums. The reader spends time in the head of the poet. He believes himself to be a fraud, lies to the women he meets, and hopes to one day achieve a “profound experience of art.” He takes overnight trains to various locations, such as Granada and Barcelona.

The majority tells of a lost soul trying to find a way to keep from feeling like an impostor. It is very difficult to like him. He treats others poorly, claims not to understand the Spanish language, and does show more not appreciate his privilege. It is possible he has mental issues, but this topic is not explored in any depth. Later in the story, a terrorist bomb explodes at Atocha Station (a real event), but rather than taking notice, the poet continues his indifferent approach to life. It is an odd little book. I picked it up on the strength of Lerner’s 10:04, which I highly recommend, but I cannot recommend this one (his debut). show less

I liked this book on a number of different levels and for a number of different reasons. It conveys that feeling of "what am I doing here?" that I'm sure many of us have had, including the self-doubt that often accompanies that feeling. It expresses concern about what poetry is, thoughts I have had also had, albeit from the point of view of someone struggling to read and understand it, rather than someone trying to write and understand it.
It does all of this so skillfully and in such a personal way that it is easy to identify with the book's hero.

A book I loved and felt connected with on a deep level. The way the main character described his interactions with people carried a sense of real alienation, and a consciousness of that alienation, that I completely identified with. Lerner writes his character's social life so convincingly, so piercingly.

It was not an irreverent book, but there were moments of extreme whimsy, or perhaps just sharp randomness, that felt faithful to the amorphous condition of humans' personalities and their interactions. And I very much identified with how lost, purposeless and dependent the main character was. He handled philosophical questions in an intensely interesting way, provoking thoughts that I have about my own life constantly and about art and show more literature and poetry that I have also played with.

The writing was precise but moved in waves, like a real thought process -- propelled forward, idea after idea, by a "sheer directionality". The setting -- Madrid -- was only icing on the cake. A great book. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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) show more 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. show less

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 show more 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,,, show less