Review of Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

At first, I found this novel's protagonist incredibly annoying, a literary reincarnate of Holden Caulfield: a young man obsessed with  his own fraudulence. Set against a beautifully rendered culture and landscape, meet Adam, a poet who has been awarded a fellowship to study in Madrid and to supposedly write poems reflecting Spain's political histories.

But what sold me on this narrator was this confession within the novel's first few pages: "I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity." Adam's perception here was riveting to me in that while questioning the conditions necessary for a "profound experience of art," he was in fact creating one of his own, albeit with a change in media.  While purists might scoff at the effectiveness of poetry when quoted in prose, I appreciated and understood Adam's perspective.

But does Adam research or work on his intended project while in Madrid? No, not really, and he does not seem to care. He wanders between lukewarm love affairs, eats too many little yellow and white pills, and drinks too much coffee and too much wine. He only starts to scribble furiously in his notebook after being questioned by one of his lovers, and this initial scribble is merely a show in which he wishes to prove to her his supposed seriousness as a poet. Throughout most of the novel, Adam seems ashamed to embrace his role as an artist and poet and instead tortures himself by over-thinking the smallest gestures, mistranslations and human interactions and how they reflect his  inadequacies.

Thus, ironically and unbeknownst to Adam, his constant self-consciousness embodies the essential essence of his artistry. What artist ever finds complete satisfaction in his process? It isn't until the very end of the novel when Adam's close translator-friend asks, "When are you going to stop pretending that you’re only pretending to be a poet?” This question and his indecision whether to leave or stay in Spain  prompts Adam to begin to exchange the inhibitions of his self-consciousness for the joy that creativity and collaboration can bring him.  He learns the poet can never truly be isolated.

Overall, Adam's journey made me question the ways in which we are all trapped by our own battles with self-consciousness, especially in today's over-documented hyper-reality. As Adam reads the paper after a terrorist attack near his apartment, he questions, "I could feel the newspaper accounts modifying or replacing my memory of what I’d seen; was there a word for that feeling?"  Thus, when does our self-consciousness inhibit us, and when do we begin to embrace it as part of an authentic experience we share?