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Leaving the Atocha Station

Author(s): Ben Lerner

Location(s): Madrid

Genre(s): Fiction

Era(s): Modern

Location

Content

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.

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Lead Review

The book opens as it describes Adam getting out bed and eventually getting over to Prado Museum to stand before the Rogier van der Weyden “Descent from the Cross.” That got me hooked, certainly...

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