Au départ d'Atocha

by Ben Lerner, Jakuta Alikavazovic (Translator)

Adam Gordon est un jeune poète américain en résidence d’écriture à Madrid. Mais il écrit peu : il fume, déambule, lit, drague Isabel, courtise Teresa... et s’invente une vie. Dans ses récits tissés de mensonges, sa mère est malade et son père fasciste. Spectateur fasciné de sa fausse existence, Adam navigue au sein d’un univers fait de littérature, d’art et d’intrigues amoureuses. Mais quand un attentat frappe la gare d’Atocha, la réalité vient troubler sa fiction.
Au départ d’Atocha est un premier roman impertinent, dans lequel les expatriés sont renvoyés au vide de leur condition, loin des corridas chères à Hemingway. Il s’inscrit cependant dans une autre filiation, où l’ironie se conjugue au lyrisme de l’errance : celle de Musil, Rilke ou Svevo. Avec ce livre inclassable, Ben Lerner esquisse un saisissant portrait de l’artiste en jeune homme.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, Spain, Literary Fiction, Poetry, Literature

205 pages, Hardcover

First published August 23, 2011

About the author

Ben Lerner is an American poet, novelist, and critic. He was awarded the Hayden Carruth prize for his cycle of fifty-two sonnets, The Lichtenberg Figures. In 2004, Library Journal named it one of the year's twelve best books of poetry. The Lichtenberg Figures appeared in a German translation in 2010, for which it received the "Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie" in 2011, making Lerner the first American to receive this honor.

Born and raised in Topeka, which figures in each of his books of poetry, Lerner is a 1997 graduate of Topeka High School where he was a standout in debate and forensics. At Brown University he earned a B.A. in Political Theory and an MFA in Poetry. He traveled on a Fulbright Scholarship to Madrid, Spain in 2003 where he wrote his second book, Angle of Yaw, which was published in 2006 and was subsequently named a finalist for the National Book Award, and was selected by Brian Foley as one of the "25 important books of poetry of the 00s (2000-2009)". Lerner's third full-length poetry collection, Mean Free Path, was published in 2010.

Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was published by Coffee House Press in August 2011. It was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and New York Magazine, among other periodicals. It won the Believer Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for "first fiction" and the New York Public Library's Young Lions prize.

In 2008 Lerner began editing poetry for Critical Quarterly, a British academic publication. He has taught at California College of the Arts, the University of Pittsburgh, and in 2010 joined the faculty of the MFA program at Brooklyn College.

Lerner's mother is the well-known psychologist Harriet Lerner.

Reviews

[Lucy Dacus · Rating 5 out of 5]

annoying lil guy

[BlackOxford · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Artist as Snowflake

An American language-student is in Madrid on somebody else’s dime, living in a paradise of lethargy, artsy natives, and drugs. He is an intellectual fantasist; somewhat autistic when it comes to poetry; and somewhat narcissistic about everything else. He also has a young person’s discernment about what is important, which is to say none at all.

He claims to be engaged in ‘research.’ But since he lies, it’s not clear what this could mean. In fact there is more than a little of Patricia Highsmith’s Mr. Ripley throughout the entire book. The narrator/protagonist is a practised fraud whose instinctive reaction to any situation is to scam. Even when zoned out on weed and booze, he can calculate and perform.

The difference from Highsmith is that she had a story. Lerner has a string of events that simply go on and on in a flood of indirect speech filled with myopic detail. Paragraph after page-long paragraph of ‘this happened, then that happened, then I smoked another splif.’ If this is about finding one’s artistic bearings, I suggest someone has slipped him a bum map with his hash. Pretentious and tedious nonsense - clearly this is part of a new literature I cannot understand.

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

LOST IN TRANSLATION


L’immagine di copertina.

Adam Gordon è un giovane poeta americano che ha da poco pubblicato una raccolta di poesie e ha vinto una borsa di studio per passare un anno in Spagna, a Madrid.
La stessa cosa è successa a Benjamin Lerner, che è l’autore di questo bel romanzo, molto divertente (molto acclamato in patria, un po’ meno da noi mi pare): anche Lerner passò un anno, o giù di lì, a Madrid, nello stesso periodo in cui Adam Gordon era nella capitale spagnola.
È certo che si siano incontrati, frequentati, e conosciuti a fondo.
Adam Gordon viene dal Kansas, proprio come Ben Lerner, l’autore del romanzo, e Adam Gordon è un fan del poeta John Ashbery, esattamente come il suo autore.
Dubito che le analogie e i rimandi tra romanziere, Ben Lerner, e personaggio protagonista, Adam Gordon, finiscano qui: ma non conoscendo personalmente Lerner, non posso indicarne altre.


La stazione di Atocha è la più grande di Madrid. Fu costruita dal 1888 al 1892, sotto la direzione di Alberto del Palacio Elissagne con la collaborazione di Gustave Eiffel. La stazione è stata ricostruita in seguito all'attentato dell’11 marzo 2004, che uccise 191 persone e ne ferì 2057.

Per esempio, Adam Gordon ha una caratteristica che non so se Lerner possiede: Adam Gordon è lost in translation.
Nel senso che parla spagnolo per salvaguardare la possibilità di dire una cosa per l’altra o di essere frainteso, ma anche per avere molteplici scelte di comprensione (qui il libro è esilarante, quando Adam racconta quello che ascolta, quello che gli viene detto, le conversazioni di chi gli sta intorno, riporta sempre più significati allo stesso tempo, o questo o quello o forse quell’altro, più significati che a volte si sfiorano, a volte invece divergono – e Lerner non offre mai la soluzione, non offre mai conferma su cosa in effetti vogliano davvero dire). Evita di parlare inglese finché può perché sa di non potersi nascondere dietro l’ignoranza della lingua, nella sua lingua madre le parole hanno un senso preciso, al quale lui si sente inchiodato.
Essere straniero in una terra straniera con una lingua straniera gli consente di inventarsi una nuova personalità, e anche più di una: soprattutto, gli consente di nascondersi, di non esporsi.
Anche a costo di qualche bugia, come quando definisce il padre, persona dolce è gentile, un fascista incallito, o seppellisce la madre, che invece è viva sana e attiva.



Adam ha anche un’altra peculiarità: vive osservandosi vivere – e a volte, si osserva mentre si osserva vivere; Adam si pone il dubbio se conti di più essere artisti o volerlo essere; prova la forma del dolore ma non il dolore, prova la grana del pensare in assenza dei pensieri, presta attenzione alla sua attenzione, attenzione a provare quello che sta provando, non una particolare poesia quanto l’eco di una possibilità poetica.

Adam è un flaneur, un passeggiatore nella e della vita, l’uomo di passaggio della traduzione italiana (il titolo originale è ‘Leaving Atocha Station’). Personaggio dalla personalità multipla, dalla percezione e elaborazione arzigogolata, che Lerner traduce con uno stile limpido, pulito, senza arzigogoli.

Atocha è la stazione ferroviaria di Madrid dove terroristi islamici fecero esplodere bombe mentre i treni arrivavano in stazione carichi di pendolari diretti al lavoro (circa 200 morti e 2000 feriti), il giorno 11 del mese di marzo, non di settembre come a N.Y. L’episodio è parte della narrazione, ma non può essere considerato un punto di svolta, un nodo cruciale: uno come Adam assiste più che partecipare, si sente sentire più che provare…


All’interno della stazione di Atocha, un giardino tropicale di quattromila metri quadrati, una vera e propria foresta esotica al coperto: la temperatura in quest’area è costante sui 24 gradi centigradi.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

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. Now some people – both critics and actual readers – have found this novel to be knee-slappingly hilarious. But what I found was

1 ½ cups of very diluted Nicholson Baker-type insane over-self-analysis of everything (you could call this ingredient Bakerlite)

3 thin slices of Eric Rohmer’s narcissistic hyper-educated long rambling conversation as-long-as-it’s-about-me types

A handful of finely ground Woody Allen, not the early funny stuff or the middle brilliantly observed sexual politics but the late period (i.e. last 20 years) gnashingly lame obviousness of such meretricious tosh as Vicky Cristina Barcelona (amongst many others)

A generous sprinkling of Iris Murdoch’s dorky academic satire

More than a soupcon of Geoff Dyer’s self-sabotaging in such effortlessly better books like Out of Sheer Rage, even though dear Geoff has written the exquisitest blurb for this very novel

25 spliffs (his word, not mine)

and

A whole lot of what-did-I-just-read sentences like these (he’s in Madrid trying to schmooze two Spanish women):

My distress about Isabel and Teresa, coupled with my guilt about my parents, opened onto larger questions about my fraudulence; that I was a fraud had never been in question – who wasn’t? [So far so good, but now comes:] Who wasn’t squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said “I”; who wasn’t a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life?

a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life? Wow. I’m not sure if Ben Lerner is asking us to howl at his protagonist for coming up with such stuff or applaud him for coming up with such stuff; if the former then this is some attenuated humour going on, a little abstruse for me, and if the latter then Ben, you need to listen to yourself. Ben – hello? Ben!


* Dandelion Wine, Oranges are not the Only Fruit, Empire of the Sun, Sons and Lovers, The Bell Jar... The list goes on; also graphic novelists do this all the time ; and film-makers too. Everybody's doin it.

[Roxane · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Jonathan Ashleigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Leaving the Atocha Stations in a couple of days and am still running the story through my head. It has language strange to the novel setting but welcome and is a book I wish I had written for its sentiments about Americans. It reminded me greatly of The Sorrows of Young Mike, which also contains AIM conversations and is also about an American abroad. Each of the books are unique but they often bring up similar issues and themes. Ben Lerner has outdone himself with his first novel and if you feel the same you should check out John Zelazny.

[Ivan Goldman · Rating 2 out of 5]

What's curious about this book is the attention and adulation it's received. It's memoir dressed up as a novel that is the author's lengthy reflection on a character that shares many traits with the author. He hails from the same town, attended the same school, etc. This character/author incessantly lies to acquaintances for no apparent reason and then is nauseated. In fact, page after page the guy is literally, not figuratively nauseous or vomiting.

Many critics seemed to think this book was an astute look at the artist's connection to art, but actually he had little to say on it. The protagonist considered himself a fraud as he smoked hash and lied throughout a Fulbright year in Spain and never gave a damn about the people around him. It would be unfair to tell you how it ended, though I stayed to the end out of curiosity. It was so well-received I thought he could perhaps pull it out. This character/author seemed to think that he'd figured things out by the end, but he didn't. The character was still repulsive, but the author didn't seem to recognize this and believed some degree of salvation had transpired.

Perhaps psychologists can find clues in the fact that although this guy is attracted to women, he describes only men. Women are names only, though he does describe their clothes. He also doesn't seem to notice that he's more or less a non-gendered metrosexual who, when things go bad, checks himself out in the mirror. Enough. I really shouldn't hammer away at the writer because it's the avalanche of positive reviews for a very mediocre work that disturbs me. I'm saddened by what it tells us about the establishment that defines what is literature and then pronounces judgment on it.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's been like ten years since I saw or read Trainspotting, but I remember being annoyed with the movie when I first saw it. The book had ended with a nihilistic pessimism that the movie kind of spun into a 'selling-out' of sorts (if cleaning up, screwing over your friends and trying to escape the zombie existence of a junkie can be called selling out). The young, angry and idealized version of myself kind of hated the ending to the movie.

As I made my way through this book, the voice of Ewan McGregor saying the whole, choose blah blah blah part of the movie kept playing as a soundtrack in the back of my brain, somewhere just in front of the occipital lobe. This book is a sort of, choose life! type of coming of age sort of novel. If coming of age can be applied to a post-college living abroad as a privileged poet sort of story line.

The book is about a fairly unlikable young poet who is living in Madrid for a year on some kind of grant to study poetry and the Spanish Civil War. He's a self-obessed bi-polar, liar who fakes his way through interactions and feels like he is duping everyone into thinking he is a poet when in reality he thinks he's just a talentless schmuck. As any good humanities major will do he over-contextualizes everything, and confuses convoluted thoughts with being ponderous ideas. He's sort of like an everyman of directionless humanity students who fool everyone (and themselves?) into thinking they are something greater than they really are.

This particular story works as a fairy tale of sorts. The misunderstood, or is it unnoticed genius, becomes one when he realizes that, Yes, I really am a great poet, it hasn't just been a pose the whole time! This is the fairy tale I think of most humanity majors, after years of bullshitting through papers and realizing that they can argue anything if they just find a few quotes and spin some words around in counter-intuitive directions that they aren't just colossal fakers but the bona-fide real deal authentic kissed by an angel embodiment of if not genius than at least exceptional talent.

For a small press book, this has had a fair amount of buzz it feels like. Or at least a few people have asked for it by name, and it was difficult to get into the store for a bit. I don't quite know why this book has gotten that attention, rather than some other small press book. It's ok. I think many of the blurbs are, um, a tad superfluous. I don't know if I read the same book that Jonathan Franzen described as beautiful. I think it's possible that so many 'serious' writers blurbed the book because it is one of those books aimed directly at over-educated folks who have the nagging suspicion that everything they do is deep down not that important, and that the guy who picks up our garbage from the curb every Tuesday and Friday is quite possibly doing something more beneficial for society than the 'life of the mind' and scribbles put to paper and put up on the internets.

I think the book is honest, and I think it's a good book but it also feels like many a book and story I've read before, or maybe it just feels like a modified version of some of my own life, without the realization of genius and the pat on the back that I am (was?) doing something worthwhile.

[Juan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has two good things going for it: the narrator is smart (which is not usual), and his voice pulls off the "Humbert Humbert effect" of making you like him despite his being both a poser and a hypocrite.

Adam, the narrator and a stand-in for Lerner, a poet himself, has interesting things to say about poetry as the art of potentiality, as a way to embody the virtual, the "subjunctive": what could be but is not and will not. This paradox ("embodying the virtual") leads him to conclude that poetry is a intrinsically failed endeavor, and is the reason why he feels like a total fake for posing as a poet, which feeling is either caused by or causes him to indulge in heavy drug use and the slacking off expected of procrastinating artists abroad, with no financial obligations and too much time on their hands.

Adam's antics have the flavor of a Woody Allen movie, his hand-wringing about authenticity always accompanied by compulsive duplicity and self-sabotage. This makes for a good part of the novel's most hilarious moments, which makes it a breezy read, despite some of the heavier philosophizing on aesthetics.

It seems to me this is an earnest investigation into the possibilities of art to comment on reality and have a "profound effect" on people, in the guise of a self-reflective, postmodern, dark-humored romp, a technique that brings to mind the dilemma common in DFW: "It would probably be better to call our own art’s culture now one of congenital skepticism. Our intelligentsia distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material possession is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level". How, therefore, to speak seriously about serious topics in literature, without eliciting a condescending smirk. Thus, the self-mocking of his constant worrying about poetry's purpose, his identification as a poet, and his self-disgust at his own duplicitous situation and personality seem to be a cover for the "uncool" task of asking himself seriously what is the importance of art when compared to the urgency of the actual and historical.

Are these pretzel-like contortions truly necessary? Is this dilemma the true condition of contemporary literature? Or is it just that young writers self-consciously choose to don overwrought armors to battle, which would, should they fall flat on their backs, prevent them from getting up?

It's an enjoyable read, wholly recommended. If nothing else, you'll get a good laugh or two out of it... unless you are a poet, in which case you might get angry.

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fiction that feels unlike fiction is my favorite sort of fiction. This one explores intellectual and emotional terrain related to sensitive experience of what's real and contrived, propelled by a sustained sense of non-fictional narrative reality accentuated by author/narrator autobiographical overlap. Seemed at its best when essayistically offering insight (not "indulging in interiority") about poetic creation/sensibilities, about reading poetry (Ashbery), and describing attacks on self (panic) or a city (terrorist). At its worst when pretentious or wonky or mannered or self-consciously sophisticated, sometimes something as slight as a tacked-on phrase or, indeed, the imposition in a short sentence of something like "indeed." Conventional scenes (not always formatted as such), sometimes semi-insufficiently characterized characters, dialogue (conventional "s/he said" quotation and summary), and a bit of plot work with the expository jags to mirror society and self as they strike poses of sincerity and contrivance in the narrator's spliff- and paroxetine-addled mind. Shades of Bernhard's "Old Masters" (only at first), maybe a little bit of "The Stranger" (my initial thought bubbles re: post-postmodern solipsism blew up to encompass the larger picture when things became post-March 11), Nicholson Baker's "The Anthologist" (poetry talk more convincing/energetic/inspired than the novel's drama/plot). Generally, I couldn't put it down. Not "hilarious" (per many of the blurbs) -- only one small LOL -- but it's intelligent, idea-driven, flowing, compelling, engaged, contemporary, questioning, touristical (I've stayed near the Prado and visited Granada and Barcelona), and sincere about the narrator's outright lies and artistic contrivances. But again, best of all, it feels like fiction that feels absolutely real (see Twain's thing about the difference between fiction and non-fiction), not much like literary fiction that might feel false in conception and execution, more concerned with "saleablity" than what it's like to be alive and abroad as homeland USA monstrously morphed into the United States of Bush . . . Oddly covers some of the same ground I've covered in old-ish stories (questions about authenticity at the artificial lake in Madrid's Parque de Buen Retiro; sitting for hours in front of a painting in the Prado), a novel I'm working on now (similar themes), and an unpublished novella (that talks a bit about Maria Schneider in "The Passenger" -- a movie I rewatched three days before reading a few lines about it in this one). Eerie compatability in theme, tone, often in approach, plus semi-farflung elements made it easy to spend most of the day after Xmas with this novel. Highly recommended, albeit maybe more of a "writer's writer" sort of book.

[Bilal Y. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Epey bir okuduktan sonra kişi okuduğu eserle birlikte, eserle kurduğu ilişkiyi de nesneleştirir. Esere biçtiği değerde bu ilişkinin rolü üzerine düşünür. Bu okuma ya da araştırma nesnesi üzerinde düşünürken, kendisinin nesneye karşı tutumunun da önemli olduğunu düşünür. Sanırım buna felsefede düşünümsellik (reflexivity) diyorlar. Öznenin nesne üzerinde düşünürken aynı zamanda özne-nesne ilişkisi üzerinde yeniden düşünmesi....

Romanın baş kişisi de benim gibi bir okur. Benden farklı olarak da üretim de bulunuyor o. Okurken bir süre sonra hani Gaston Bachelard'ın, gökyüzüne uzun bir süre sonra baktıktan sonra gökyüzünün artık bize baktığını, düşünmemiz şeklinde kendi kendini nesneleştirdiği bir ruh haline sahip romanın baş kişisi. Okurken okunduğunu, kendi kendini okuduğunu, eser üzerinden kendisini okuduğunu görür benim gibi.

Bombaların patladığı, yumrukların atıldığı, yetişkin bir adamın karşısındakine sarıldıktan sonra annesini hatırlayıp ağlamaya başladığı bazı önemli sahnelerin yanında romanda beni çok etkilemiş olan ikonik bir sahne vardır. Romanın henüz başındaki romanın baş kişisinin, benim birkaç defa okuduğum bölümde, büyük sanatçı - müze bekçisi ikileminin yaşandığı bu müze sahnesinde, her zaman durduğu yerde büyük sanatçının durması ve izlerken de sanki kendini izliyormuş gibi hissetmesi, kişisel gelişim terminolojisiyle bana empatik geldi. Sanatçının sanat yapıtı karşısındaki tavrını ve tutumunu işaret eden büyük sanatçının hıçkırıklar içinde kaldığı sahneye karşılık sanat yapıtını tüm tehlikelerden koruyan müze bekçisinin hiç bir zaman bu duyguyu hazmedemeyeceği şeklindeki büyük çelişkiyi de gösteriyor bu sahne.

Salamina Askerleri, Mahcubiyet ve Haysiyet, Vahşi Hafiyeler gibi romanların yanına koyuyorum Atocha'dan Ayrılış'ı bu bakımdan. İsimini zikrettiğim romanların kişiye özel olduğunu düşündüğüm için bu romanlarla ilgili pek ketum davranırım. Soran olursa ne anlatıyor diye. İşte okuyan bir adam var. Ee başka. Şey başka bir şey yok. Böyle. Ama güzel. Ne var ki, bu güzellik eserin güzelliğinden ziyade sizin güzelliğiniz. Evet bu eserin ya da bu tür eserlerin en önemli yönü sana güzelliğini göstermeleri.

"Sonra etrafımdaki arkadaşlarımla cam tavanlı bir odada sonsuza kadar yaşamayı tasarladım." cümlesiyle bitiyor roman. "Tasarladım" "düşledim" olsaymış daha iyiymiş ama o kadar da önemli değil. Önemli olan böyle bir dünyayı böyle bir düş ile, böyle bir cümle ile taçlandırmak, onore edilmiş bir biçimde.

[Melanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little disappointing. I think I am getting tired of young super smart, over-educated young men who can't "feel"... The novel has nice moments though and the writing is fluid and elegant.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 3 out of 5]

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, according to Ben Lerner's terms, I wasn't supposed to care about that; I was supposed to be reading for the sense of "directionality."

So how does the book do on that front? Does it draw us in to Ben's (sorry, Adam's) life and make us feel as if we're there, experiencing the passage of time and its subtle variations along with Ben? Does it make us feel as if the small moments, rather than the big milestone events ("plot"), are the real stuff of life? Uh, no. To me this book felt very episodic, like a diary. A lot of it is internal. Ben (sorry, Adam) spends a lot of time thinking about writing; some of this is interesting and some of it is impossibly esoteric. He experiences problems with anxiety that seem like they're part of another book (a memoir about anxiety, perhaps). He bumbles around Madrid, trying to make friends even though his Spanish isn't good, with some humorous outcomes and some tedious ones. A terrorist attack happens and Adam describes some of the reactions of city residents, but makes no real effort to understand what they're feeling and seems to feel very little himself. A long instant-message conversation between Adam and a friend from home is by far the most riveting part of the book, but it just seems dropped in there, with no relation to anything else. There's not much connecting anything to anything, and I feel like you could shuffle these sections without significantly changing the overall impact of the book. So much for "the texture of time passing."

Whether he means to or not, Lerner offers an alternate way to read this book. Adam attends a poetry reading but isn't impressed by the first poet's work: Even though his Spanish isn't great, he can just tell the poems are filled with cliches. In order to attempt to enjoy them more, Adam tries approaching the poems in a different way:

I forced myself to listen as if the poem were unpredictable and profound, as if that were given somehow, and any failure to be compelled would be exclusively my own.

That pretty much sums up this book. If you approach it assuming it's meaningful, you'll find meaning here. If you approach it without assuming it's meaningful but waiting to be shown meaning, you'll probably be kept waiting. (Whether that failure is your own is something you can decide for yourself.)

Obviously, there's a trend now of writers publishing thinly veiled life stories and calling them novels. Little attempt is made to add lyricism or interpretation to these "novels" (indeed, if these things were added, they'd probably have to be called "memoirs"). This trend has produced novels good (Rachel Cusk's Outline), bad (I should probably stop picking on You're Not Much Use to Anyone, but I don't want to), and WTF (Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be?). Leaving the Atocha Station isn't terrible, but it's not up there with the best of this new genre. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm spending all my time thinking about your artistic choices instead of getting lost in your book, you're doing something wrong.

So should you read this book? That depends--do you like asking yourself a lot of questions about what qualifies as a "novel" and what doesn't? Do you like asking yourself if something is meant to be meaningful even when it seems like it isn't? Do you like wondering if things are supposed to be funny or not? Honestly, I sometimes enjoy asking myself these questions, but I wouldn't want to have to do it all the time. So I'm curious to see where Lerner goes with his second novel, 10:04, but only the passing of time will reveal if this relationship is meaningful or just a phase.

[Biron Paşa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Atocha'dan Ayrılış'ta Genç şair Adam Gordon'ın burslu olarak bir yıllığına Madrid'te geçirdiği zamanları okuyoruz. 22:04'teki üsluba ve tarza çok benzeyen -ama bence biraz daha samimi ve biraz daha güçlü ve hatta daha derli toplu, çok şeyden bahseden, özgün ve zekice bir anlatımla karşı karşıyayız. Yine 22:04'teki gibi otobiyografik bir hikâye var.

Samimiyet sözcüğünü sevmem, samimi olduğu iddiasında bulunulan kişilerden de genelde nefret ederim; çünkü toplum tarafından samimi bulunan, adı böyle anılan kişiler genelde belli bir vasatlık düzeyini aşmayan, ekseriyetle de aslında varoşluğu ve cehaleti popülistçe yüceltmekten başka hiçbir şey yapmayan kişilerdir. Ben Lerner'ın iki kitabında samimiyetin güçlü yer tuttuğunu söylerken ise bunlardan hiçbirini kastetmiyorum. Ben Lerner'ın samimiyeti belki -benimle de aynı yaşta olan ve kalabalıktayken aynı benim gibi far görmüş tavşana dönen- "hayat acemisi", hayatın içinde kaybolmuş sempatik ve beceriksiz Adam Gordon sayesinde ortaya çıksa da, bu samimiyet derin, gizli saklı duyguları bulup çıkarabilecek ve ustaca yazıya dökebilecek kadar da akıllıca.

Kitabın dertleri esasen karakterin, şiirin ne olduğu, şiiri deneyimlemenin ve anlamanın ve şair olmanın mümkün olup olmadığı gibi sorulara cevap arayan ve bu cevapları kaldırmaya, onlarla yüzleşmeye çalışan Adam'ın Gordon'ın dertleri. Aynı zamanda şair olan Ber Lerner ağzından bu sorgulamayı dinlemek hem keyifliydi, hem de rahatlattı beni çünkü çoğu zaman şiirler hakkında, şiir okuyan insanlar hakkında onun hissettiğine benzer şeyler hissediyorum ve yalnız olmadığımı görmek güzeldi. Şiirin büyüsünü bir ben mi kavrayamıyorum derken, derin sanatsal deneyimlerle sıkıntısı olan Adam Gordon'la özdeşlik kurmak kolay oldu.

Bu daha entelektüel problemlerin yanı sıra, bence kitabın en önemli, en vurucu yanlarından biri de işlediği yabancı olmak, yalnız olmak temaları. Bu yalnızlığın Adam'ın kafasındaki dünya ile gerçekteki dünya arasındaki güçlü farkı kavradığı zamanlarda ortaya çıkışını çok beğendim. Orhan Pamuk'un Kar romanındakine benzeyen tarzdaki yalnızlığın, orada da Ka iki kadına birden ilgi duyuyordu, bir yazarın ilk romanından beklenmeyecek ölçüde ustaca anlatıldığını düşünüyorum. Yine aynı şekilde uyuşturucu ve alkolle girilen yakın ilişkinin de başarılı aktarıldığını düşünüyorum.

Kitabı yavaş yavaş, sindire sindire, tadını çıkara çıkara okudum ve okuyacak olan herkese de böyle yapmasını tavsiye ediyorum. Benim aksime, 22:04'ten önce okumak da daha iyi bir tercih olacaktır.

Ben Lerner yaşayan yazarlar içerisinde en beğendiğim yazarlardan biri oldu diyebilirim.

[whimsicalmeerkat · Rating 1 out of 5]

That this book is impressively boring is probably the most positive thing I have to say about it. I found it vapid and remarkably without point. It is the story of an uninteresting, probably intended to be considered tortured, young American poet who pretended his way into a fellowship in Spain by stating his intention to write a poem about a subject about which he knows nothing. He has no intention of writing said poem. That this is the character is not, of course, the true problem with the book. Those surface facts do not necessarily result in a bad book. Unfortunately, the author does nothing with them. The character has no depth, he mostly spends the book getting high and pretending to care about things, and there are several wandering discourses on writing and poetry which I imagine are intended to sound clever. The promise of the book having something, anything to do with the Madrid train bombings is unrealized and that event becomes merely a backdrop for more musing on the part of the character about his disconnectedness. Even that is implied to be affectation.

I know nothing about Ben Lerner or his poetry. It could be it is quite good. Regardless, he should have stuck to it rather than prose. One hopes he does a better job in his role as creative writing teacher than he does in that of author.


Disclaimer: I received an advance review copy of this book for free through the Goodreads First Reads giveaway program.

[Konserve Ruhlar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kitap anlatmaya çalıştığı yazar-şair olma/olamama durumunu başarıyla yansıtıyor. Başka bir ülkede akıcı konuşmadığın bir dilde var olabilme kaygısı o kadar iyi anlatılmış ki, çoğunlukla kendimden izler buldum. Kahramanımız Adam'in anlatmaya zorlandığı hisleri, o karışık ruh durumu, alkol ve uyuşturucunun etkisi ve sanat yapma çabasıyla ilişkisi çok iyi anlatılmış. Edebi sahtekarlığın sınırlarında gezinen iç seslerle bezenmiş bir kitap.

[Gorkem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Giriş :

Atocha'dan Ayrılış berbat geçen bir 2 yıllık okuyamama sürecinden sonra benim açımdan bir kurtarıcı etkisi yapıp tekrardan okuma hızımı ve heyecanımı geri kazandıran bir kitap oldu. Ben Lerner'in kendi şahsına münhasır tonlaması, kendi yaşamını laboratuvar inceliğinde gözlemleme becerisine sahip olması kendisini en sevdiğim yazarların arasına otomatikten yerleştirdi. Hem de bir Amerikalı olmasına rağmen.:)

Konu:

Atocha'dan Ayrılış en kaba haliyle bir sanatçının kendi sesini bulma sürecini anlatan bir roman. Kitabın arka kapağında geçen Adam Gordon'un şiir bursu alıp İspanya'ya gidip İspanyol İç Savaşı ve şiiri hakkında yazması gereken bir projenin oluşum süreci romanın kemiğini oluşturuyor. Bu süreçte, kendisine olan güvensizliği, söylediği yalanlar, beceriksizlikleri (ilişkileri de dahil) doğrultusunda bir varoluş sancısı okuyoruz. Adam Gordon'un üçkağıtçılığı, edebi sahtekarlığı ise gene en kaba haliyle kendini arayan bir sanatçının yolculuğuna bizleri dahil etmek adına çok kibar bir davet. Ek olarak müthiş bir sosyo-politik ve kültür eleştirisi romanı. Ve son olarak, harika bir bildingsroman ve antihero örneği.

Sonuç:

Kitabın beni bu derece etkilemesinden sanıyorum yukarıda bahsettiklerim haricinde sanatçının deneyim kazanma sürecini hem yüzeysel hem de müthiş metafiziksel göndermeler halinde okura sunmasıydı. Sanat eğitimi alan bir çok kişinin ortak sesiydi bana göre bu kitap. Kitabın anlatıldığı 5 bölüm boyunca bu metafiziksel gönderimler çıkışlar ve inişler halinde okurun kendisini de deneyimlemesi adına harika bir deneyim oluşturduğunu düşünüyorum

Örneğin Adam Gordon'un kendi kendini sorguladığı şu müthiş arayış içeren paragraf: (sf.78)
"...İnternette New York Times okurken, istila başladığından beri daima en amansız günü yaşadığım halde, dil ve deneyimimin kıyaslanamazlığının yeni olup olmadığını, deneyimime ait deneyimimin pornografi ve imtiyaz ile bozulmuş bir hayattan çıkıp çıkmadığını, yıldızlı gökyüzünün tüm makul yolları aydınlattığı mutlu dönemler olup olmadığını merak ediyordum, yoksa deneyimin bu adlandırılmayana ve yaşanmayana bölünmesi deneyimin ta kendisi miydi her zaman herkes için."

Bunun yanında Ben Lerner'in kendi otobiyografik sürecini ve kendi yazarlık deneyiminde yaptığı her şeyi bir şekilde bu kadar açıkça paylaşması inanılmaz samimiydi. Özellikle kitabın son kısmındaki sakinleşme hissini Ben Lerner o kadar müthiş bir şekilde hissettirdi ki farkında olmadan gözlerimin dolup, Adam Gordon'a iyi şanslar dileyerek kitabı kapadım.

Kitabı herkesin sevebileceğini düşünmüyorum. Keza goodreads'de görülüyor. Eğer sanatsal düşünce ve yaratım konusunda biraz kendi kişisel deneyiminiz varsa ya da bu süreçin oluşumu konusunda merakınız varsa ya da müthiş samimi bir yazarla tanışma isteğiniz varsa, Adam Gordon sizi müzede ya da kaybolabileceğiniz bir yerlerde bekliyor. Eğer böyle bir merakınız yoksa üzgünüm ki Atocha'dan Ayrılış vakti.

Okuyacaklara keyifli okumalar!
10/9

"Özgürlük yükselişteydi.Uçakkların gürültüsü ispinozlarn üzerinde tuhaf bir etki yaratıyordu.Bazı türler, bazen binlerce böcek birden çelişkileri körükleyerek parıldamalarını senkronize etti. Neden aynalar arasında doğmuştum?"

[Ratko · Rating 3 out of 5]

Пратимо вишемесечни резиденцијални боравак младог америчког песника у Мадриду. Писац је добио стипендију како би писао поему инспирисану Шпанским грађанским ратом, иако о томе не зна баш ништа, а и са шпанским језиком није баш најфамилијарнији, бар на почетку свог боравка. Тако ће, тих неколико месеци, искористити за (бес)циљне шетње по Мадриду, посете музеијма, „дување“ хашиша и кретање по уметничким мадридским круговима. Присуствоваће и терористичким нападима у нареченој мадридској железничкој станици, те ће се и дотаћи политичких кретања у Шпанији.
Роман је написан „штреберски“, на моменте претенциозно. Несумњиво је да аутор зна како се роман пише и које технике при томе треба да се примене. Једино што није успео да сакрије све те књижевне трикове. Могуће да ће временом сазревати и бити још вештији.
Намеће ми се поређење са „Отвореним градом“ Теџу Кола, с обзиром да имају донекле сличне теме. Ипак, Теџу Кол ми се доима убедљивијим.
Оцена: 3+

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Leaving the Atocha Station in Madrid, which undoubtedly helped me enjoy its tale of a young American poet adrift in the Spanish city. The narrator, Adam, is grotesquely honest about everything, particularly his profuse self-doubt and almost compulsive habit of engaging in completely pointless deception. At times this gives him a vulnerability that is sweet and endearing; at times it makes him seem an objectionable manipulator – sometimes both in the same paragraph. (And never more so than the whole horribly hilarious saga in which he tells a girl he fancies that his mum's dead so she won't think he's a pussy for crying for no reason, then tells his girlfriend the same thing for consistency, then accidentally says she's alive in front of the girlfriend and has to backtrack, so decides to do so by claiming his mum is gravely ill and his dad – 'the gentlest and most generous man I knew' – is basically a Nazi.) There's also the charming opening scene in which he wonders, with incredulous jealousy, whether a man weeping in the Prado Museum is having 'a profound experience of art'.

It's tempting to call Adam a loser, but he's more complicated than that, and also more ordinary than that. He's certainly not, as I frequently thought he would be, the archetypal loser who gets the girl. (He spends most of the book lusting after a beautiful, intelligent woman, Teresa, and never actually has sex with her!) But good stuff does happen to him, and he gets a sort-of happy ending, even though its impermanence is made very clear. Some of Adam's behaviour is utterly ridiculous – yet I really related to him. In fact, his paranoia and insecurity (he suffers from acute imposter syndrome) actually made me feel better about my own. I was a bit worried this book might be slightly obnoxious; it was actually a really pleasant surprise.

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[David Carrasco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hay libros que uno lee como quien escucha a alguien mentir sabiendo que miente. No porque quiera atraparlo, sino porque en esa distancia entre lo falso y lo posible se cuela una forma rara de verdad.

Saliendo de la estación de Atocha, de Ben Lerner, es exactamente eso: una novela que te susurra al oído con el tono de quien no se cree ni a sí mismo, pero que en su tartamudeo encuentra una música difícil de ignorar. A ratos parece un experimento, a ratos una confesión, pero nunca se deja atrapar por el artificio, porque tiene claro que la pose también es una forma de sinceridad si se interpreta con la ironía justa.

La historia, en términos mínimos —porque resumir esta novela es como intentar embotellar el humo de un canuto de hachís mientras miras pasar trenes por Atocha— sigue a Adam Gordon, un joven poeta norteamericano becado para investigar la poesía española en Madrid. Pero investigar, aquí, es un verbo que sirve de coartada. Adam deambula por la ciudad con más ansiedad que propósito, alternando visitas a museos, fiestas semibohemias y encuentros ambiguos con mujeres que parecen demasiado pacientes o demasiado europeas para ser reales. Y mientras fuma porros, miente, se traduce mal a sí mismo y vive con el síndrome del impostor tatuado en la frente, va armando un diario mental de su propio vacío. Hay momentos, incluso, en que la Historia —sí, la Historia con mayúsculas— se cuela en la novela, como el 11-M, y descoloca aún más al narrador, que no sabe muy bien si sentirse conmovido o simplemente incómodo.

Lerner construye esta novela como quien va soltando pensamientos sin saber si los va a volver a recuperar. Hay una estructura, sí, pero es tan disimulada que parece improvisada. La narración está dominada por una primera persona hiperlúcida y narcótica, un flujo de conciencia que mezcla lo trivial con lo trascendental sin apenas despeinarse. La prosa es como Adam: brillante y autoindulgente, elegante en su desorientación. Tiene ese ritmo pegajoso de alguien que piensa demasiado y a la vez se ríe de su exceso de pensamiento. Si Don DeLillo hubiera escrito En busca del tiempo perdido después de una semana en Malasaña, algo así podría haber salido. Pero esto es Lerner, y eso quiere decir que hay una sensibilidad post-internet que lo empapa todo, aunque nunca se nombre: la ansiedad flotante, el miedo al ridículo, la certeza de que todo es una puesta en escena y que la autenticidad es una superstición romántica.

Adam no es un personaje entrañable. Ni siquiera es especialmente interesante como ser humano, pero es fascinante como artefacto narrativo. Su capacidad para analizar su propia farsa, para describir cada emoción mientras duda de estar sintiéndola, lo convierte en un espejo turbio que sin embargo refleja con precisión la conciencia de una generación. Y ahí está uno de los grandes logros de Lerner: ha escrito una novela sobre la disociación emocional sin caer en la afectación ni en la psicología barata. Adam es un fraude que lo sabe y que usa esa conciencia como estrategia de supervivencia.

Y en ese juego de máscaras conscientes, uno no puede evitar pensar en El guardián entre el centeno , pero reescrito por alguien con estudios en teoría crítica y Google Translate abierto en otra pestaña. Holden Caulfield era un adolescente enfadado con el mundo; Adam Gordon es un joven que se siente culpable por no enfadarse lo suficiente. Donde Holden buscaba autenticidad, Adam busca un motivo para no bostezar. Vamos, que si Holden Caulfield hubiera leído a Derrida y fumado porros paseando por el Retiro, se parecería bastante a Adam Gordon.

Esta mezcla de ironía, autoconciencia y desasosiego no surge de la nada. Hay ecos claros de W.G. Sebald en el modo en que la reflexión se entrevera con la descripción de paisajes o cuadros del Prado, y también un aire de Thomas Bernhard en ese monólogo neurótico e hiperlógico que no puede parar de hablar de sí mismo mientras finge que habla del mundo. Pero Lerner tiene un oído distinto: uno sintonizado con la parálisis moral del yo contemporáneo. Y si hay una comparación inevitable, es con 10:04, su siguiente novela, que lleva muchas de las obsesiones de Saliendo de la estación de Atocha al terreno más maduro —y más arriesgado— de lo meta-narrativo. Si en esta primera novela hay algo de declaración de intenciones, en 10:04 hay un intento de redención. Aquí, todavía no. Aquí, el personaje no quiere salvarse; solo quiere entender si está actuando su vida o simplemente vive mal.

Más allá de esas influencias literarias, el libro habla, claro, de la traducción. No como un arte lingüístico al uso, sino como metáfora vital. Adam está constantemente traduciendo sus emociones al español, sus gestos al contexto local, sus ideas al marco cultural del otro. Y, como toda traducción, fracasa. Pero en ese fracaso encuentra un hueco donde vivir. También se aborda el arte, la poesía y la imposibilidad de escribir algo verdadero en un mundo plagado de posturas. Sobre todo, se respira esa tristeza suave de estar siempre un poco fuera de lugar, como un americano en Atocha, observando cómo otros viven mientras él toma notas para una novela que no sabe si está escribiendo o protagonizando.

Y aquí está el gran truco de Ben Lerner: consigue que leer a Adam Gordon sea como leerse a uno mismo durante un mal viaje de ácido. Todo parece impostura, pero hay frases que duelen porque son verdad. Y cuando cierras el libro, te das cuenta de que no ha pasado casi nada, y sin embargo, algo se ha movido. Algo se ha roto, o al menos se ha tambaleado. Y eso, en los tiempos que corren, ya es mucho.

¿Por qué no le doy la quinta estrella? Pues porque Saliendo de la estación de Atocha no es una novela que busque la perfección formal ni la plenitud narrativa, y eso te puede dejar con la sensación de que has leído el esbozo brillante de algo más grande que nunca llega. Hay un riesgo consciente en su forma, pero ese mismo riesgo también limita su alcance emocional: a veces la ironía protege tanto al narrador que impide que duela del todo. Y eso, dependiendo del lector, puede ser una genialidad o una barrera.

Pero ese 4 está más cerca del entusiasmo que de la tibieza. Porque lo que hace Lerner aquí —ese retrato neurótico, lúcido y sin red del yo contemporáneo— lo hace con una precisión poco común y un oído afiladísimo. Hay novelas que te hacen sentir más acompañado en tu rareza, y eso vale más que muchas tramas perfectas. Así que sí: cuatro estrellas con gusto, y con ganas de seguir leyendo lo que escriba este tipo que sospecha de sí mismo tanto como nosotros.

Y es que eso es precisamente lo que busca Lerner: no gustar, no convencerte, sino descolocarte. No darte una historia redonda ni un personaje que puedas admirar, sino incomodarte con inteligencia. Quiere que te rías mientras te reconoces en lo patético. Y, si te dejas, logra algo que pocos consiguen: convertir la deriva en una forma de lucidez. Hay novelas que te atrapan por la trama. Esta te arrastra por su deriva. Y cuando llegas al final, no sabes si has leído una novela, un ensayo encubierto o simplemente una especie de performance literaria. Pero sí sabes una cosa: no fue una pérdida de tiempo. Porque en ocasiones el vacío también tiene forma, y a veces esa forma se parece mucho a una buena novela.

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is everything I usually despise. Too much drug use, very in your head wordplay, meta commentary on poetry and art. Yet Lerner’s truly virtuoso prose makes the despicable somehow compelling, and once you learn to laugh at (and occasionally with) our insufferable post-adolescent-poet-abroad narrator, the book is not only enjoyable but thought provoking and moving. Looking forward to the next two books.

[Tao · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://believermag.com/exclusives/?re...

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this book with high hopes -- from the description I thought it might have some of the qualities of Arthur Phillips's PRAGUE, but with a Madrid setting (resonant for me since I'm currently writing about that city, albeit in a very different era). I was, I hate to say, disappointed.

Perhaps I was missing a layer of irony, but I almost immediately lost patience with and sympathy for the narrator, Adam Gordon – a pampered pseudo-poet who is wasting a prestigious fellowship smoking dope and lying to everyone he meets during his aimless wanderings through various substrates of Madrid's intellectual society. I think Lerner, a truly talented poet in his non-novelistic life, may have been trying to write a comic novel here, a sort of anomie-laden Gen-Y LUCKY JIM; but the situations Adam gets himself into never develop beyond the twinge or cringe level. The targets of his humor, if targets they are, don't really seem to merit being targeted, as Professor Welch so richly did in Kingsley Amis's evergreen comedy. And Adam indulges in several acts of real cruelty or weirdness - claiming his mother is dead or dying of cancer, running up enormous debts on his parents' credit cards - without the author giving us reason to forgive or excuse or justify such behavior.

I am, I realize with some bewilderment, in the minority in this view; the book has been included in numerous year-end "best of" lists, so clearly I am missing something. I have to say that I wasn't all that taken with "Reality Bites" when it came out, either; so maybe I have a low tolerance for slacker fiction. But then why did "Pineapple Express" make me laugh until I cried?

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is just no way that I will sit here and shit on an author for no reason just because I wasn’t a huge fan of the book. I was thinking about giving this book a 2-star rating and changed it in the last second. I realized that a lot of the things that were turning me off about the main character were attributes that I could see in a present or past self.

And let’s start with that: the main character. Holy shit. What a weird, unlikeable sack of shit. He does almost nothing authentically, and everything is put on to garner pity. He is the recipient of a prestigious fellowship for creative writing, and he has been granted the opportunity to go to Spain and “study” the art in order to infuse some Civil War into his poetry. He spends the novel walking, popping Adderall, lying to people, crying, vomiting, doubting himself, and shitting. I am absolutely not joking. But I guess to make a character this unlikeable is a talent, so cheers Ben Lerner. Like I said, I have done some of those things! I have doubted myself, vomited, cried, and shat. So take the pity star.

There are mere moments of emotional brilliance in this book. Out of 181 pages, I would number them at 10 or so pages, and even those are mostly taken up by an IM conversation he is having with a friend back home as he sits in an internet café (the year is 2004, so… yeah). Despite these moments, however, I just could not help but cringe at the intellectual narcissism on display by the protagonist (or the author? OR BOTH?).

In the middle of the book, the protagonist, Adam, is talking about the poet John Ashbery. He says “Ashbery’s flowing sentences always felt as if they were making sense, but when you looked up from the page, it was impossible to say what sense had been made.” In order to see how I feel about the book, just re-read the above quote and replace “Ashbery” with “Lerner”.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

One day I will have a daughter, and on the eve of her bat mitzvah I will give her this book. I will say, "Read this, child, and learn something very important: learn why you should never date a poet."

[Cosimo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nascendo tra gli specchi

Lerner in questo libro sembra interessarsi all'ambiguità del reale: un giovane poeta, morbosamente indeciso e bugiardo, si trasferisce a Madrid con una borsa di studio e partecipa a feste e eventi artistici; impostore che finge di fare ricerche, a disagio con il proprio talento, frequenta due donne che amano il suo essere straniero e la sua identità sdoppiata ed è coinvolto da spettatore nel drammatico attentato alla stazione di Atocha dell'11 marzo. Adam Gordon è un uomo tormentato e triste, vitale e inquieto, dipendente da farmaci, droga, alcol e menzogne, individuo intelligente e profondo: vive dentro un racconto e una crisi e si sottrae alla vita tra il Prado e El Retiro, nella noia di un vagabondare letterario e artificiale e nell'assenza di motivi e obiettivi, aderendo completamente al flusso delle proprie emozioni. E così, tra gesti istrionici e delusioni sentimentali, in un linguaggio sempre segnato dall'incertezza, affiorano la necessità di cancellare ogni distanza esistenziale e un sentimento di vergogna che lo trasporta verso se stesso, suggerendo nuove possibilità di coinvolgimento e autenticità.

“Allo stesso tempo, però, provavo una specie di euforia per quella improvvisa incapacità di provare emozioni, un’eccessiva emozione di secondo grado che comunque non alterava l’insensibilità di primo grado. Quell’euforia, se di euforia si trattava, era lontanissima dal corpo, e perciò compatibile con la mia anedonia: era come se galleggiassi in un bagno caldo al di fuori di me. Avvertivo una specie di vampa di forza, la forza di percepire il mondo come sotto vetro, e quel distacco, insieme con la riduzione del mio bisogno o capacità di dormire, mi conferiva un’energia quasi vampiresca, anche se ero io stesso la mia preda”.

[Lea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this less than Lerner's "The Topeka School", but I still enjoyed reading it for the most part. The question is: why? There is hardly any story and what there is is thin and often-read-before. The main character is quasi the author, on a poetry fellowship in Madrid, in semi-relationships with two Spanish woman. He takes too many drugs and doesn't really feel like a real "poet", he doesn't even seem to like poetry in the first place. We don't really get that get close to any of the characters and none seem very interesting or nice.

I can only conclude that I really liked the writing, why else did I find this engaging?

While I liked this less than "The Topeka School", the fact that it's trying to do less, makes this a much easier read. It's quite straight forward and simple, which is a weakness and strength at the same time.

[el · Rating 3 out of 5]

can white boys have swag? the answer is: kind of, maybe, not really, no.

ben lerner can write (this isn’t saying much; he’s a poet; i expect him to be attendant to the sentence as an individual unit), but he writes ‘annoying’ so convincingly that his book began to annoy me. excellent depiction of self-obsessed wants-to-be-a-writer-but-doesn’t-read poseur male poet who thinks every woman should immediately want to fuck him or something has gone critically wrong with him/her/the world. reviewers suspect this to be another book in the tradition of “poet pivots to fiction with a fiction debut that is actually just a thinly veiled autobiography.” i don’t know how true that is of lerner.

regardless, this was a fascinatingly scathing take on politics + poetry, veers into roberto bolaño territory (at least aesthetically), but ultimately a book i found too minute and meandering in construction. i didn’t ever really truly fear for the narrator or find that he was forced to confront himself or his interpersonal dynamics beyond the surface-level. the ending especially i thought was a letdown.

not much story here at all. just a downward narcissism spiral intercut with cig breaks and esoteric drug-fueled inner monologues.

favorite character: spain/the spanish language.
least favorite character: everyone else.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are obvious winners in a meritocratic system - there are the chosen ones blessed with enough genetic and generational advantages to be comfortably pre-positioned over all competitors. There are real competitors who manage to figure out the Great American Alchemy of converting sweat to gold. And then there are those rudderless bastards who have no real sense of what happened, who faked compliance with parental and then social definitions of success without ever fully investing and were rewarded as though none of it was ever a pantomime, promoted or elevated above the more passionate and dedicated by a boss or superior who couldn’t draw the necessary distinction between lucky improvisation and hard work. I know a significant number of people who have very important jobs - prosecutors, senators, artists, doctors - who scurry around wondering when everyone else will catch on to how much is ad-libbed, faked or improvised and live forever flinching against the inevitable day the boss will sit them down and disclose (not without a little embarrassment) that it has become clear that a mistake was made.

So if you are fortunate enough to hold a steady passion about what you do or to feel like you really have earned most of what you’ve acquired (and not just at the “I’m so lucky because I’m a white American still living in the lattermost days of empire” level of generality), this might not be a good book for you. Not much happens, for one thing, and the protagonist isn’t much to be proud of, but he will speak directly to those of us who find ourselves frequently rewarded out of proportion with what we deserve.

Ben Lerner won the National Book Award in his early 20s and spent a year in Madrid on a Fulbright scholarship to study poetry. It spoils nothing to reveal that the bratty, overmedicated poet abroad tracks Lerner’s ostensible experiences so closely that this reads like a very thinly abstracted autobiography. The protagonist, who I can only think of as Lerner, is dedicated to a preposterous assignment - something about writing an epic poem about effect of Franco on literature - which he realizes immediately is something he cannot do. That the managers of his stipend might think this is something he could do is only the first of his confrontations with fraudulence in the face of the ridiculous. Because all of the stipulations of his work are impossible and because he cannot find in himself any passion for what he’s doing (Lerner confesses early that he has utterly failed to be moved by poetry in any language), he is left with no choice but to announce his unsuitability for his station (which would only deprive him of his hash and reimpose more mundane expectations) or fake it. Left to translate the relevant works with a level of Spanish inappropriate for a 7th grader, his method is summed up more or less as follows;

“On these days I worked on what I called translation. I opened the Lorca more or less at random, transcribed the English recto onto a page of my first notebook, and began to make changes, replacing a word with whatever word I first associated with it and/or scrambling the order of the lines, and then I made whatever changes these changes suggested to me. Or I looked up the spanish word for the English word I wanted to replace, and then replaced that word with an English word that approximated its sound (“Under the arc of the sky” became “Under the arc of the cielo”, which became “Under the arc of the cello”). I then braided fragments of the prose i kept in my second notebook with the translations I had thus produced (“Under the arc of the cello/ I open the Lorca at random,” and so on).” p.16

He expands this method to the crafting of his poetry and ostensible existential product, the erstwhile scholarship meant to justify the thousands of dollars needed to continue his time in Iberia. Lerner pops pills and stays stoned at all times to keep the anxiety of fraudulence from overturning him and exposing the abyss beneath his project, but every pending agony of discovery is met with ever more applause. Presupposing that he is an important poet, his audiences imbue his incoherence with subjectively important meanings and react as though they have heard something profound. Because all of his clauses are subordinate, because all words are juxtaposed, the reader is free to extrapolate whatever significance or authorial intent they find the most meaningful. Lerner, to maintain his anonymity and continue his project, must be careful to answer only in deliberately garbled and poorly translated tautologies and takes countermeasures like deliberately sabotaging his Spanish as to allow yet further imprecision in his artistic explanations and lower the likelihood of follow-up. And it doesn’t go much further than this. Lerner is embraced ever more tightly by a connected community of Spanish artists and writers who never manage to confront him with anything beyond unqualified praise and acceptance, meets a few women who he intermittently covets but cannot transcend the limitations of his contrivance. Lerner is an awkward liar and constantly bracketed by the need to maintain the artistic vagueness which he imagines saves him from discovery and ridicule. Through it all, the accolades keep coming and coming, and the grand arc of the story does little more than trace his migration from seeming flummoxed and conflicted about why his meager, unfocused poetic efforts are so well-met to feeling fine about the same. I’m not sure if this was the sentiment intended but the Lerner of the late novel seems less a man who has learned his own measure as a charlatan who has contented himself with the rationalization that there are no artistically or socially significant differences between the real and the faked - the reader is free to be equally excited about either.

This is some cynical stuff, and there’s no real rectitude in it. Lerner never stops faking, he just feels better about it, and while there is an attempt at tidying this up with a gesture toward the idea that if you fake something long enough, you’ll get it, this seems more like a nod toward the need for closure in a novel structure than a sincere evolution within the character, and it remains the case throughout that the intent of the author doesn’t much matter - art, if it exists at all, is the co-existence of beauty with a vagueness broad enough to be appropriated in as many ways as possible.

So anyhow, read this book if you’re a big fraud and it’s only a matter of time before you’re discovered.

[Roy Lotz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an intriguing little novel. It concerns Adam Gordon, an American living in Spain (difficult for me to relate to), who is supposed to be writing a long poem about the Spanish Civil War, but who is instead busy abusing substances and pursuing Spanish women.

On one level, the book seems to be a character study of a man who, if not quite sociopathic, seems to aspire to be. Though he has pangs of conscience and moments of vulnerability, for the most part he is so concerned with making other people believe certain things about himself that he cannot spare a moment to really care about them as people. He seems to be suffering from a kind of existentialist disorder, thinking that everybody is a phony, including himself, but that he is perhaps superior for knowing that he is acting in bad faith. He is incapable of believing that somebody simply means what they say. Every tone of voice, facial twitch, or gesture becomes a sign to analyze for the deeper meaning. This paradox of both caring deeply about what people think while not caring about them as people—of being both genuine and fake, or genuinely fake—dooms the character to miserable anxiety.

On another level, the book is a meditation on language. Lerner brilliant captures the sensation of speaking, socializing, making friends, and having relationships in a foreign language—how the barrier of language can both foster and negate intimacy, both reveal and hide one’s personality. This is weaponized by the protagonist, who uses his inability to communicate fluently as a way of convincing others that his thoughts are too deep to be expressed, or as an excuse not to have to say his real opinion, or as a reason to utter sphinxlike pronouncements. (Though like most of the narrator’s attempts at manipulation, other people see right through it.)

A poet before he was a novelist, Lerner includes some more philosophical reflections on the nature of language and poetry—specifically, about how poetry ceases to be about anything external to it, but a pure experience of language itself. It occurs to be that this theory of poetry, if tweaked, is an apt psychological description of his protagonist, who cannot relate directly to anything in his surroundings, but whose mind is always lost in a maze of self-referential worrying.

Considering that Lerner was himself a poet who lived in Madrid on a Fulbright Grant, I think it is reasonable to suppose this book contains a fair amount of autobiography (though I hope he is not much like his character). One of the novel’s minor pleasures is Lerner’s ability to evoke the feeling of an American seeing Spain for the first time—the cities, the art, the food, the people—which made me feel nostalgic for my first year in the country. Even if that were not the case, however, I would say that this is an intelligent and enjoyable novel about a rather pathetic man.