Leaving The Atocha Station (2011) - Plot & Excerpts
I’m sure this is going to bend my review towards the positive, but Leaving The Atocha Station has a special place for me because the narrator is a young single dude bouncing around Madrid and Barcelona during the time of the subway bombings in 2004. I also happened to be a young single dude bouncing around Madrid and Barcelona during 2004. So, keep that in mind when I start gushing, because man is it going to flow. The plot of the book is barebones. It is there, gradually growing and ramping up towards the end, but it is definitely not the star of the show. It follows Adam Gordon (who, from what I gather, might as well have been named Ben Lerner), as he blows through a year-long poetry fellowship in Madrid. Along the way, he meets other young people, mostly Spanish, wants to sleep with a few women and ends up doing so with some of them, drinks espressos, smokes a tremendous amount of both hash and cigarettes, hits the museums, and generally avoids working on the project he was assigned and sent to Madrid to do. This book is a breeze to read through, the short length complimenting the sparse plot perfectly. The first thing that made me really love this book was the fact that I think it cinches up what travelling in Europe feels like, at least for over-observant, keep-to-themself, broody 20-something types who, for a given amount of time (a year for Adam; three months for me), are relieved of any responsibility larger than being on time for the train ride to take them to their next destination. Of course, there is a tremendous amount of self-involvement to this endeavor, I’d definitely grant that. And from the reviews I’m reading about this book, people are either ok with this or they are not. The self-involvement by far has been the biggest critique of the book, which is fine. I was ok with it, fascinated by it, could feel Adam’s observations, not only of what was going on around him, but how he felt about what was going on around him, as both familiar and funny and sharp as a razor.I gave this book five stars because of the narration. Adam pulls off this great trick of being an almost completely detached observer to his own emotions. It’s as if he’s watching them pass by him as he’s experiencing them. This frees him up to announce his shortcomings, jealousies, fears, neuroses and other various unlikables (throughout the book, I couldn’t think of any other word for describing Adam than the word twit, but in the very best sense of the word), with such detachment that it feels like he might as well be describing floats in a parade as they go by. He doesn’t shy away from revealing his thoughts and feelings, instead just lists them off with what I saw in my head as a shoulder shrug. Here is a quote that illustrates what I’m trying to get at: “She kissed me on the lips and I felt in love with her.” He doesn’t say fell in love or was in love with her, he filters his emotion, is dubious about it, separates it from himself with the word felt. Adam seems much more interested in examining his inner reactions than what is going on around him. The book even opens with his largest emotion being his wonderment at his lack of feeling when it comes to art. It made for fun reading, at least in this instance, because first of all, he’s spot on with many of his observations of how certain situations can make someone feel (the surreal feeling one gets at the attempt of communication through a different language, the fact that Euros look and spend like Monopoly money, the feeling that you can smoke your lungs black in Europe because you’ll quit when you get back home) and second, I’ve never read anything quite like it in a work of fiction. Tightly written, well-edited. His musings on the distance between "experience" and "art" never were tiring for me and I liked how the awkwardness of social situations was captured (the response of the narrator to the poetry reading at the gallery was so spot-on). I do think the content/context will resonate with a certain audience (academic, having lived abroad) more, but I appreciated the writing immensely.
What do You think about Leaving The Atocha Station (2011)?
This book made me realize that I am the type of person who would prefer to like their protagonist.
—sarabeth
This novel renewed my interest in novels after many years off the boat.
—elizfash
