#Leaving the Atocha Station

[litsnaps]

[quotespile]

No matter what any poet did, the poems would constitute screens on which readers could project their own desperate belief in the possibility of poetic experience, whatever that might be, or afford them the opportunity to mourn its impossibility.

Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station

[man-reading]

Leaving the Atocha Station

by Ben Lerner

Veering between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a dazzling introduction to one of the smartest, funniest and most audacious writers of a generation.

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 attitude towards art. Fuelled by strong coffee and self-prescribed tranquillizers, Adam's 'research' soon becomes a meditation on the possibility of authenticity, as he finds himself increasingly troubled by the uncrossable distance between himself and the world around him. It's not just his imperfect grasp of Spanish, but the underlying suspicion that his relationships, his reactions, and his entire personality are just as fraudulent as his poetry.

[apexpoet]

Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner

[book51ut]

Review of Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

I read this one bc it was recommended by a friend who is never in the same city as me, when i told him i was moving to Spain. Let me say, as an American living in Spain, it is quite relatable. I’m not living anywhere nearly as lovely as Madrid, but so many parts just rang so true, being an American in Spain & hating other Americans in Spain, insisting that i can’t speak spanish even though i can get by, and feeling like the year is passing me by like a hazy heroin high, slowly & then all at once. I would recommend it to other expats or temporary foreigners, it’ll hit home. I am also a poet, so I really related to the author & the sense of despair and annoyance with writing. I don’t find myself capable of reviewing the book without this bias of familiarity on both fronts, so I won’t. Maybe if you’ve never experienced it, you won’t like the book. But this is my review, and I did experience it, so i liked the book.

[clancyycat]

books i read in 2024: 2.0 bc tumblr ate my last list

gregor and the curse of the warmbloods - suzanne collins (jan)

gregor and the marks of secret - suzanne collins (jan)

gregor and the code of claw - suzanne collins (jan)

the cartographers - peng shepherd (jan-feb)

god spare the girls - kelsey mckinney (feb)

untamed - glennon doyle (feb-mar)

grimoire girl - hilarie burton morgan (apr)

lore - alexandra bracken (may)

holy the firm - annie dillard (may-jun)

the christie affair - nina de gramont (may-jun)

we show what we have learned - clare beams (may-jun)

there's always this year - hanif abdurraquib (jun)

the ocean at the end of the lane - neil gaiman (jun)

trigger warning: short fictions and disturbances - neil gaiman (jun)

the rural diaries - hilarie burton morgan (jul)

wolfish - erica berry (jul)

bless the daughter raised by a voice in her head - warsan shire (jul)

the trouble with poetry - billy collins (jul)

fever 1793 - laurie halse anderson (jul)

we run the tides - vendela vida (jul)

the last true poets of the sea - julia drake (jul)

we have always lived in the castle - shirley jackson (jul)

foxfire: confessions of a girl gang - joyce carol oates (aug)

neverwhere - neil gaiman (aug)

manhattan beach - jennifer egan (sep)

the mary shelley club - goldy moldavsky (sep)

leaving the atocha station (oct) (don’t read this)

the god of endings - jacqueline holland (nov)

appalachian elegy - bell hooks (nov)

don’t let the forest in - c. g. drews (nov)

inspection - josh malerman (dec)

somewhere beyond the sea - tj klune (dec)

[sallytwo]

2 & 17 for the book asks!

17. Any books that surprised you with how good they were?

i read a ton of famous literature this year so it’s like. duh everyone knows one flew over the cuckoos nest and catch 22 and the stranger and slaughterhouse five and catcher in the rye are good. but they are crazy good.

i didn’t expect leaving by the atocha station to get me so bad but it did THAT BOOK IS REALLY GOOD

[septembriseur]

I’m in Spain for a work thing. I flew into the Madrid airport, and I had kind of a tight connection to make: my flight landed just before 8 PM, and the last train from the Atocha train station to Barcelona, where I was spending the night, left at 9:15. From the airport to Atocha is, on paper, a 30-minute commuter train ride, so it seemed like— again, ON PAPER— as long as my flight landed on time, I should be okay.

I reached the commuter train terminal at the airport at 8:15. Great! There were commuter trains scheduled at 8:17, 8:32, and 8:47. I got to the platform. Apparently, I had missed the 8:17 train? Okay, no problem. I waited.

No trains came. No future trains were listed on the platform displays. 8:30 came and went. No sign of any train. Tourists milled about, confused. Spaniards: unfazed.

8:45 came and went. An announcement was made that a train would come at some point, but was 15 minutes late.

A train arrived at about 9 PM. It declared itself to be going to Atocha. Everyone going to Atocha got on board.

After two stops, an announcement was made that the train was not going to Atocha, but rather terminating at a different stop. Everyone on board was confused, and a long conversation ensued about whether or not the train was, in fact, going to Atocha.

At the next stop, more people going to Atocha boarded the train. When we told them that the train was not going to Atocha, they said that they thought the train probably WAS going to Atocha in spite of the announcements, because there had been a big rearrangement of trains in December and now you never knew where a train was going when you got on it.

We arrived at the different station where the train was supposedly terminating. There was no announcement. More people going to Atocha got on the train. The train did not leave. Eventually, the lights on the train went out, so we got off the train and got on a different train. This train declared itself to be going to Alcalá de Henares. Then, after a few stops, all its electronic displays crashed, rebooted with the Windows logo, and announced that the train was going to the airport.

However, the train in fact went to Atocha, where I arrived at 10 PM. There were no more trains to Barcelona and I had to spend the night in a capsule hotel.

When I told my husband about this, he said that if it had happened on a British TV show, the show would have been accused of anti-Spanish racism.

The end.

[clunelover]

Okay I’m almost done with Leaving the Atocha Station at which point I’ll have read all three of Ben Lerner’s novels in a week. I’m fully obsessed. I think he’s great. When I try to explain what makes them unique, it probably sounds pretentious but I don’t think it is. Like, in The Topeka School he uses third person when talking about the main character, a teenage boy who is a barely fictionalized version of himself, but then very occasionally will switch, abruptly yet seamlessly, to first person. That could be confusing or annoying, but he makes it work. So cool. I guess he’s primarily a poet and I might be obsessed enough to give the poems a try.

[brush101]

68% Women in 2024

All Fours - Miranda July

Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

The Razors Edge - W. Somerset Maugham

Scaffolding - Lauren Elkin

The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot

Trespass - Rose Tremaine

The End of the Affair - Graham Green

Close to Home - Michael Magee

The Bass Rock - Evie Wyld

The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

Olive, Again - Elizabeth Stroud

Kairos - Jenny Erpenbeck

Ordinary Human Failings - Meghan Nolan

The Rachel Incident - Caroline O'Donoghue

Divine Might - Natalie Haynes

Penance - Elizabeth Clark

The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

The Children of Men - PD James

Leaving Atocha Station - Ben Learner

Tiananmen Square - Lai Wen

The Ground Beneath Her Feet - Salman Rushdie

[jewel-odom]

Book Review: Leaving the Atocha Station (2011)

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner was published in 2011 and won the Believer Book Award for the same year. Lerner’s debut novel, it was also named one of the best books of 2011 by the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, and the Guardian, among others, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the New York Public Library’s 2012 Young Lions Fiction Award. Lerner is most prominently a poet, part of what makes this novel so alluring – he writes very lyrically, taking the reader on a syntactical ride that is arguably more important than the plot itself.

The plot follows Adam (or Adán) Gordon, an American poet spending a year abroad in Madrid on a prestigious fellowship in 2004. As Adam tells people throughout the novel, the purpose of his fellowship is to research and write a long and serious poem about the Spanish Civil War, a topic Adam knows nothing about and has absolutely no interest in. This sets him up to feel like a fraud, a sense of insecurity that permeates everything he does and almost ruins him. This feeling comes to a head when the 2004 Madrid train bombings occur, and Adam is shoved into a turbulent moment of passionate protest in Spain. Despite how dramatic this sounds; many people concur that Lerner seems to reject the idea of plot with this book.

While events do happen to and around Adam, the text is much more focused on Adam’s perception of people rather than the events themselves. Maureen Corrigan, writing for NPR, says the novel is “one of the most compelling books about nothing I've ever read.” Pages on pages are spent inside Adam’s head as he obsesses over the idea of being fake: a fake artist, a fake poet, a fake bilingual. He is afraid he is not capable of experiencing real emotion or real art, a concept the book opens with and follows through two romantic relationships and several blossoming friendships. This is something of a ‘meta-fiction’, something self-aware, both ironic and not ironic, fiction and not fiction, real and not real.  

An interesting article about Leaving the Atocha Station (which I first read for a 21st century American literature class – shoutout to Dr. Clark) discusses how Lerner experiments with the use of mediation and perception in LTAS. I would highly recommend reading this article (linked at the end) written by Daniel Shields from the Los Angeles Review of Books. My own experience of Lerner’s work became much clearer when I began to think of it in terms of an ironic and self-aware commentary on mediation and how one perceives their own experiences rather than something driven by plot.

This book is a very different experience from my previous two reviews. It falls more into the ‘literary’ category: it is dark, thought-provoking, and not the fun beach read that A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is. However, despite having read it almost a year ago now, it still prevails as one of my favorite books and lingers in my mind as I move throughout my daily life.   

~SPOILERS AHEAD~

I recently read George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain (which I would strongly recommend, if you are at all interested in literature and/or writing), where I first heard of skaz narration. Skaz narration, an old kind of oral narrative originating in Russia, pops up in Saunders’ chapter on “The Nose” by Nikolai Gogal. While reading this chapter, I couldn’t help but think of Lerner’s novel. The basis of skaz narration is that the story is told through an untrustworthy or unreliable narrator and the reader knowsit. As Shields comments on in his review, Adam is not only incredibly subjective in his experience of the world, but also filters it through the use of tranquilizers, pills, weed, and alcohol. This filters it for the reader as well, making him the perfect example of a skaz narrator.

This was the kind of self-reflexive point of view that drew me into this book. I felt like I was reading more than just the story on the page – I was being forced to read between the lines to find the real story. Perhaps one of my favorite consistent plotlines is the dynamic between Adam, Isabel, and Teresa. The two women repeat the same conversation with Adam constantly: Adam insists his Spanish and bad and each woman, confused, tells him it is perfect. As the reader, who do you choose to believe? This is the question of all skaz narrators. But just as important as the unreliable narrators are the reliable side characters who question them, prompting the reader to question them as well.

Another reason I love this book so much is the intersection of art within it. Famous paintings, artists, monuments, writers, and poets are referenced throughout as Adam considers how he fits in amongst them. This intertextuality adds another layer of experience to the novel. I found myself looking up pictures of what Adam was looking at before reading his internal dialogue so I could attempt to recreate his experience. In this, the novel, or rather I, became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Adam does not understand his own creative process; he thinks he is a fraud. However, by the end of the novel he is highly successful. Yet I, the reader, still didn’t understand his creative process. Even looking at the same things he was, I didn’t feel any more of an ‘artist’, the same way he didn’t feel any more of an ‘artist’. This novel embodies what the plot revolves around: the creative ‘process’ is messy, elusive, and to an extent, nonexistent.

On that note, I’m going to end it here. I could go on and on about this book, so as always, leave your opinions in the notes.

Sources:

Leaving the Atocha Station: https://coffeehousepress.org/products/leaving-the-atocha-station

NPR Article: https://www.npr.org/2011/11/09/142109786/life-without-plot-in-leaving-the-atocha-station

Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/still-hungry/

A Swim in the Pond in the Rain: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/609280/a-swim-in-a-pond-in-the-rain-by-george-saunders/

[litsnaps]

[quotespile]

I believe she imbued my body thus, finding every touch enhanced by ambiguity of intention, as if it too required translation, and so each touch branched out, became a variety of touches.

Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station

[theyearlywalk]

Ben Lerner - Leaving the Atocha Station

[thecoffeephilosopher]

The Hatred Of Poetry

The Hatred Of Poetry

I do not like the provocative title. I don’t think it is particularly useful. Years ago, before I became a father, I read Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (I have not read any of his poetry, or rather, any of his poetry collections; I have probably read one of his poems in a magazine), but Hatred is my first time returning to him. The actual contents are much less provocative…