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Original Title:	Leaving the Atocha Station
ISBN:	1566892740 (ISBN13: 9781566892742)
Edition Language:	English
Characters:	Adam Gordon
Setting:	Madrid,2004(Spain)
Literary Awards:	New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award Nominee (2012), James Tait Black Memorial Prize Nominee for Fiction (2012), PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize Nominee (2012), William Saroyan International Prize for Writing Nominee for Fiction (2012), Believer Book Award (2012) Sami Rohr Prize Nominee for Jewish Literature (2013)

Leaving the Atocha Station Paperback | Pages: 181 pages

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Title	:	Leaving the Atocha Station
Author	:	Ben Lerner
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 181 pages
Published	:	August 23rd 2011 by Coffee House Press
Categories	:	Fiction. Novels. Contemporary. Cultural. Spain. Poetry. Literature. American

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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.

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Ratings: 3.79 From 10716 Users | 1148 Reviews

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Adam Gordon is a poet who seems to hate poetry. Hes gotten himself a pretty sweet fellowship, a year-long stay in Spain with a project, that, when explained, rings sort of false. Hes got a flexible relationship with truth and suffers no shame for wiping spit under his eyes and pretending his mother has died to gain sympathy. There is no crisis of conscience when he takes a tragic story his friend tells and makes it his own meaningful tale. Hes also got a steady diet of white pills and spliffs

One of those memoirs which with a light dusting of name changing and event rearranging gets to be called a novel. Whether it is one or not is no longer a question which anyone asks. The autobiographical novel is a grand tradition* - this one stars a more than somewhat bi-polar American student (prone to lying outrageously for no reason and having wild spending sprees with his parents dough) who is the most cheese-paringly psychologically self-regarding a narrator since Henry Late Period James.

Adam Gordon is living the life of a poet in Madrid on fellowship from his American university. Still, sensing a great divide between his experience and the reactions of others, he is filled with anxious awareness of being a fraud, a disconnect. Of course, given his rudimentary grasp of Spanish and the grandiose claims he has made for his thesis, it is hardly surprising that he feels distanced from reality, adrift in a foreign culture. I'm not convinced the drugs and the alcohol help.The first

What if, instead of being deranged, the underground man were merely bored and cynical?This is an enervating read. Several times in its short span I considered quitting. Very little happens, and I almost found myself wishing for even less. Because what human drama there is is incorrigibly - perhaps defiantly - banal. I sometimes take banality more personally than I probably should. I couldn't shake the feeling that the narrator-hero was representative in some way, the voice of a generation, or

"The problem of leisure/what to do for pleasure." - Gang of Four.This could have been so bad. A first novel (I think?). An autobiography dressed up as a novel. A bildungsroman about a young American abroad. When we meet Adam Gordon, he is on a poetry fellowship in Madrid. Adam makes friends, gets high, wanders around, writes poetry, and has occasional contact with, you know, like, actual Spanish people. There are several lackluster love affairs, a poetry reading. The plot is so thin that the

No. No. No. Beautiful writing at the sentence level. Often funny. Too much meditation about the nature and meaning of art. I just hate those kinds of books. I like stories.

Early in this book, Ben Lerner explains how you're supposed to read this book. On page 19, talking about attempting to read Spanish prose, Lerner's narrator, Adam, reveals:I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.Since by page 19 it was already very clear to me that Leaving the Atocha Station would be rather short on plot, I understood that,