Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel. Adam Gordon, the narrator of Ben Lerner’s subtle, sinuous, and very funny first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House 15), is a descendant of those frustrated Russian antiheroes. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt M nster f r Internationale Poesie. On the one hand the violence is linked to the U.S., is a response to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq which Aznar, an ally of Bush, supported despite its extreme unpopularity with Spaniards. 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. With some autobiographical elements to the novel author Ben Lerner and Adam are both poets who have spent time in Spain (Lerner as a Fulbright Scholar) and. The bombings that take place at the Atocha station on 3/11 are the moment where all of this collides in the novel. 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.īorn 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. Leaving the Atocha Station is a deft and meticulous reading of the development of an artist.' - Brian Evenson, Leaving the Atocha Station is a marvelous novel, not least because of the magical way that it reverses the postmodernist spell, transmuting a fraudulent figure into a fully dimensional and compelling character. 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.

Atocha station novel