| Leaving the Atocha Station | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Ben Lerner |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Coffee House Press |
| Publication date | 2011 |
| Media type | Print Paperback |
| Pages | 181 pp |
| ISBN | 978-1-56689-274-2 |
| Dewey Decimal | 813/.6—DC23 |
| LC Classification | PS3612.E68L43 2011 |
Leaving the Atocha Station is the first novel by American poet and critic Ben Lerner. The Guardian and The New Statesman named it one of the best books of 2011.[1] [2] The New Yorker included it in its Reviewers' Favorites from 2011.
The novel is narrated in the first person by Adam Gordon, an early 20s American poet participating in a prestigious fellowship in Madrid circa 2004. The stated goal of his fellowship is long narrative poem highlighting literature's role in the Spanish Civil War. Gordon, however, spends his time reading Tolstoy, smoking spliffs, and observing himself observing his surroundings.
Like James Joyces's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Leaving the Atocha Station can be read as a Künstlerroman. Though, Lerner himself has said:
The protagonist doesn't unequivocally undergo a dramatic transformation, for instance, but rather the question of "transformation" is left open, and people seem to have strong and distinct senses about whether the narrator has grown or remained the same, whether this is a sort of coming of age story or whether it charts a year in the life of a sociopath.[3]
The title of the novel is taken from a John Ashbery poem of the same name published in The Tennis Court Oath.[4]
One of the books Gordon often carries during his time in Spain is Ashbery's Selected Poems. At one point in the novel, Gordon reads a selection from Selected Poems. "The best Ashbery poems, I thought, although not in these words, describe what it's like to read an Ashbery poem."[5]
Ashbery called Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station "[a]n extraordinary novel about the intersections of art and reality in contemporary life."[6]
Review by James Wood in The New Yorker
Interview by Tao Lin in Believer