On a trip to Granada with Isabel, a woman he’s dating, Adam pretends to take notes so she’ll imagine he’s preoccupied with brilliant observations. (“As I said this, I thought of my dad patiently trying to get a spider to crawl from the carpet onto a piece of paper so he could escort it safely from house to yard.”) For much of the novel he takes advantage of his poor Spanish, allowing others to assign “a plurality of possible profound meanings” to his gestures and fragmented speech. Early on he says that his mother is dead to gain the sympathy of an attractive woman, and implies that his father is a heartless tyrant. His deliberate, analytical voice makes his confessions more humorous and unsettling. He tries to hide this fraudulence by lying to manipulate the perceptions of others and communicating in discreet morsels of insight that suggest a profound interior life. The first phase of his research consists of spending mornings at the Prado, writing in the park, fantasizing about becoming fluent in Spanish by mastering Don Quixote, watching online videos of “terrible things,” smoking the aforementioned hash and re-reading John Ashbery.Īll the while Adam struggles with a pervasive sense of fraudulence, or a fear of being exposed. The novel is narrated by Adam Gordon, a young American poet on fellowship in Madrid, where he’s supposedly researching a project on the literary legacy of the Spanish Civil War. Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner’s first novel, features a narrative voice both detached and almost painfully forthcoming, photographs with odd and often humorous captions, and hash, a surprising amount of hash. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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