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. In prose that veers 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 his generation.
Editorial Reviews
Review
A remarkable first novel … Gales of laughter howl through Leaving the Atocha Station. It’s packed full of gags (Adam is convinced that Ortega y Gasset is two people, like Deleuze and Guattari) and page-long one-liners itemising the narrator’s ghostly immunity to normal human relations … After the attacks, with the election of Zapatero imminent, an activist tells Adam that he has been “up all night protesting and partying. I asked if those were the same things, protesting and partying.” The question is not asked maliciously and the book never feels like satire. What is does feel like is intensely and unusually brilliant. Beyond that, I don’t know quite what it is and I like it all the more for that. –Geoff Dyer, Observer
The narrator of Ben Lerner’s short but potent novel is, by his own admission, a fraud… A morbid fascination at his social awkwardness and self-destructive duplicity, and the tension created by a mind teetering on the edge of panic, are some of the more straightforward pleasures of the narrative. But there is much more to this beguiling text. We perceive an intellectual rigour and ideological coherence behind Gordon’s masks; through these Lerner sets up profound questions about the possibilities of art and human experience… That the novel refuses to yield clear answers is no accident. Like the literature Gordon eulogises, its charge derives from the ambiguities that emerge from its contradictory propositions. –The Times
Hilarious and crackingly intelligent, fully alive and original in every sentence. –Jonathan Franzen
About the Author
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 Munster fur Internationale Poesie. Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel.
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