Like anyone who has spent a year abroad, Adam begins his fellowship with bold – and comically unachievable – goals. The book, which is thin on plot, is thick with Adam’s paranoid and self-focused interior monologue a mean-spirited stream of consciousness that’s both very honest and very funny. If that narrative risks coming off as trite, then Leaving the Atocha Station, by American poet Ben Lerner (who spent a year in Madrid as a Fulbright scholar), is far from it. Instead he smokes pot, takes prescription drugs, forms wafer-thin relationships and frets constantly about the validity of his experiences. Officially, he’s in the Spanish capital to write a “long and research-driven poem… about the literary response to the Civil War.” But Adam intends doing no such thing (thank god). And the fact he’s spending a year in Madrid, as the recipient of a prestigious fellowship, is thanks to total pretence. Young American poet Adam Gordon is a fraud and a bastard. Lerner never trades on the allure of Spain in 'Leaving the Atocha Station'.
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