 First edition | |
| Author | Ben Lerner |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Coffee House Press |
Publication date | 2011 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print Paperback |
| Pages | 181 pp |
| ISBN | 978-1-56689-274-2 |
| 813/.6—DC23 | |
| LC Class | PS3612.E68L43 2011 |
Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) is the debut novel by American poet and critic Ben Lerner. It won the 2011 Believer Book Award. [1]
The first-person narrator of the novel, Adam Gordon, is an American poet in his early 20s participating in a prestigious fellowship in Madrid circa 2004. The stated goal of his fellowship is to write a 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. He also pursues romantic and sexual relationships with two Spanish women, lying to them and others to elicit sympathy and avoid responsibility. He tells several people that his mother has recently died, recounts a friend's experience of a failed attempt to rescue a drowned woman as if it was his own, and uses his (sometimes feigned) lack of Spanish fluency to falsely suggest that his thoughts are too profound and complex to convey outside of his native language. Especially when called upon to participate in poetry readings or discussion panels, Gordon grapples with feelings of fraudulence and anxiety.
Leaving the Atocha Station can be read as a Künstlerroman. However, Lerner 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. [2]
The mentioned station is Madrid Atocha railway station.
The title of the novel is taken from a John Ashbery poem of the same name published in The Tennis Court Oath. [3]
During his time in Spain, Gordon often carries 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." [4]
Ashbery called Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station "[a]n extraordinary novel about the intersections of art and reality in contemporary life." [5]
According to Book Marks, based on mostly American publications, the book received "rave" reviews based on eleven critic reviews, with eight being "rave" and two being "positive" and one being "mixed". [6] On The Omnivore, a British aggregator of press reviews, the book received an "omniscore" of 3.5 out of 5. [7]
The New Statesman named it one of the best books of 2011. [8] The New Yorker included it in its Reviewers' Favorites from 2011. [9] Jonathan Franzen considered it one of his favorite books of the year. [10] It won the 2011 Believer Book Award. [1]
The Human Stain is a novel by Philip Roth, published May 5, 2000. The book is set in Western Massachusetts in the late 1990s. Its narrator is 65-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in several earlier Roth novels, including two books that form a loose trilogy with The Human Stain,American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998). Zuckerman acts largely as an observer as the complex story of the protagonist, Coleman Silk, a retired professor of classics, is slowly revealed.
John Lawrence Ashbery was an American poet and art critic.
Atocha may refer to:
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Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.
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Coffee House Press is a nonprofit independent press based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The press’s goal is to "produce books that celebrate imagination, innovation in the craft of writing, and the many authentic voices of the American experience." It is widely considered to be among the top five independent presses in the United States, and has been called a national treasure. The press publishes literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
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Dear Life is a short story collection by Canadian writer Alice Munro, published in 2012 by McClelland and Stewart.
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