Leaving the Atocha Station
Ratings21
Average rating3.6
Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his attitude towards art. Fuelled by strong coffee and self-prescribed tranquillizers, Adam's 'research' soon becomes a meditation on the possibility of authenticity, as he finds himself increasingly troubled by the uncrossable distance between himself and the world around him. It's not just his imperfect grasp of Spanish, but the underlying suspicion that his relationships, his reactions, and his entire personality are just as fraudulent as his poetry.
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I have no idea how to rate this book because:
- CON: I could die happily before reading another novel about a young white man abusing substances while having Thoughts and Feelings about women and the nature of art
- PRO: it's beautifully and uniquely written; I learned like eight new words while reading it (e.g., duende: the power to attract through personal magnetism and charm)
- CON: there's plenty of navel-gazing digressions
- PRO: it's pretty funny at points
- CON: the thinly veiled roman a clef reveals many pathetic traits of the author
- PRO: we're all pathetic so we may as well be honest about it
Three stars it is.
After reading quite a few that didn't quite hit the mark, I loved Leaving the Atocha Station. It's the right mix of pace, detail, sensitivity, and variation for me.
