Leaving The Atocha Station (Book Review)
 

For those of you who are interested in reading about countries before you visit, I offer the following.

Leaving The Atocha Station by Ben Lerner is the Blair Witch Project of novels. Unless someone told you what it was supposed to be, there would be no reason to believe that it was insightful and funny. I attributed my initial irritation to my advanced age and an antiquated sensibility, but soon realized it was the novel itself. As people over the age of 21 should not pick up their dates on a skateboard, they should also stop bragging or recounting their drug and drinking moments. It is tedious and a trite reminder, especially for an accomplished poet, of a desolate life.There was one or two throw away lines that were funny, but otherwise, I needed canned laughter as a matter of instruction. I have spent considerable time in Spain and for someone who supposedly trades in the human condition Lerner offers little insight into modern Spain and Spaniards. And while he does mention the bombing at Atocha station, his is not an illumination of the event, but a flawed attempt to offer a different emotion. He loves his Jamesian sentences and there some beautiful phrases, but they seem to be screaming, "Hey I am successful poet and this novel is my experiment. And don't forget it."

Upon reading the professional praise and then reading the novel, I felt like I was taken. In essence this is a self-indulgent, humorless, solipsistic bore.

Hi IMDONEHERE,

Thanks for the heads-up on the novel LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION as "...a self-indulgent, humorless, solipsistic bore."

Unfortunately, that what I find with most modern fiction. Guess I will stick to the dull stuff - history, social commentary, memoirs, biography etc. :)

Scholars usually qualify modern fiction as starting some time around 1919 and running through the early 1960's.

Thanks for making my aware of this, sounds anything but uninteresting.

"...it is one of the paradoxes of this cunning book that what might seem a skeptically postmodern comedy is also an earnestly old-fashioned seeker of the real—that other thing". http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...eality-testing

"...a bildungsroman and meditation and slacker tale fused by a precise, reflective and darkly comic voice".
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/bo...anted=all&_r=0

"It isn't often that first novels by small-press modernist poets get picked up by publishers like Granta, but then, it isn't often that any book comes with advance praise from James Wood, Paul Auster, James Meek and Jonathan Franzen."
http://www.theguardian.com/books/201...-lerner-review

Hi KIMHE,

"It isn't often that first novels by small-press modernist poets get picked up by publishers with advance praise from ... Jonathan Franzen."

OMG, I read Franzen's FREEDOM which was widely acclaimed and suggested to me by a college English professor. I even bought the book (had many gift certificates to book stores from students)and plowed through the 800+ or whatever pages. I thought it was one of the worst books I ever read!

I guess I just don't get modern fiction! I'll stay with Wharton, James, Trollope, Hardy and the boys. :)

It was the professional reviewers that first drew my attention to the book. And when I posted this review on Amazon, I thought I was going to be in the minority but there were others with same conclusions.

Nothing like sweeping aside 60 years of fiction, with one brief wave of the hand. I guess there is no place in your world for Roth, Bellow, Oates, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, etc, etc.

Philip Roth is an old favourite, and I was intrigued by The New Yorker's allusion to "the drifting, weak, amoral, angry heroes of Russian literature", for example Dotoyevsky's Underground man. But you're right, I'm more into Russian, Norwegian and Spanish (timeless) litterature than Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.

About Spain, I quite recently read Norman Lewis 1984 masterpiece "Voices of the old sea", highly recommended: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...s-8647518.html
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Voices-Old-S.../dp/0330345613

A little more about Norman Lewis:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/200...travel.fiction

Kimhe I was referring to Lateday's off-hand dismissal of decades of writers.

Thank you for the reference to Norman Lewis, I will give it a try.

Sometimes a foreigner's vision of a country reveals a clarity that is difficult for someone who was born and has lived there. Unfortunately that was not the case for Ben Lerner.

IMDONEHERE,

"Kimhe I was referring to Lateday's off-hand dismissal of decades of writers."

"I guess there is no place in your world for Roth, Bellow, Oates, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, etc, etc."

Actually I love Roth, just re-read Saul Bellow's HERZOG, appreciate Toni Morrison. So I guess what I said above is somewhat of an overstatement. Bottom line, I guess I prefer non-fiction.

Once you see the phrase "slacker tale" that should be a warning that the text would be best used if printed on toilet paper and stashed in the WC.

Alice Walker? Dreadful writer. She is almost as bad a writer as Maya Angelou was a poet.

Alice Walker should not be mentioned with Roth, Toni Morrison, or Cormac McCarthy.

Another American great: Wallace Stegner.

I never read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, but I loved The Corrections. He is good at depicting familial relationships.

Thin, Trollope fan