Recent Reading: Leaving the Atocha Station

 

Jessie Gaynor at lithub.com called Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station one of the best debut novels of the decade (2010-2019). I will make no comment on that judgement, but I will say that I read the book yesterday and enjoyed it.

The book is a book about an American living in Madrid, Spain, meeting women, attending parties, fetishizing marijuana, and, generally, not doing the writing his grant was given to him for. In other words, the book is a sort of Seinfeld slacker novel -- a novel about avoiding work and doing nothing. And yet, the book is also a rather subtle book that has something to say about what, to me, are important issues like language, identity, and poetry.

For example, consider this quote that touches on identity and language:

“I have known you for six or seven months,” she said, almost sadly. “We only speak Spanish. When are you going to admit that you can live in this language?” she asked.

 

I was touched by this, mainly because I thought she was inviting me to live in Spanish with her, to stay beyond the fellowship. My anger dissipated. “I can live in this language with you, but not with María José and the foundation. Besides, I have nothing to say about ‘literature now,’” I said.

 

Again there was something like sadness: “Adam, you are a wonderful poet, a serious poet. If I weren’t sure about that, why would I be translating you? When are you going to stop pretending that you’re only pretending to be a poet?” She said only my name in English.

“You project what you pretend to discover in my poetry,” I said in English (pgs. 158-159).

 In addition, I would like to highlight this quote:

To myself I was saying: You don’t love Teresa and she doesn’t love you. None of this is real. You don’t like Madrid, with its tourists and dust and heat and innumerable Pietàs and terrible food. The fucking fascists. You are ready to quit smoking, to clean up, to return to friends and family. You have outgrown poetry. You will be a legitimate scholar or a lawyer but you are done with Teresa and hash and drinking and lying and lyric and the intersections thereof. I have never been here, I said to myself. You have never seen me (pgs. 169-170).

 

Leaving the Atocha Station is a short novel that can be read quickly, but it has some depth.