![]() ![]() As a highly symbolic, psychological novel by a poet, Atocha has the atmosphere of Sylvia Plath’s frequently underappreciated The Bell Jar. The March 2004 Al Qaeda commuter train bombings fracture the novel, and protagonist Adam Gordon’s uncomfortable failure to come to terms with the place of the poet in global politics is Atocha’s core crisis. It is also his attempt to examine what it means to be an American artist of language in the first decade of the twenty-first-century. ![]() But what happens when a person suffers similarly, but for poetry? This is the question Ben Lerner pursues in his first novel Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), an autobiographical portrait of a young poet’s year spent in Madrid evading the responsibilities of his “prestigious fellowship,” smoking a not inconsiderable amount of hash, and mistaking cultural misunderstanding for “negative capability.” Following three notable collections of poetry- The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), Angle of Yaw (2006), and Mean Free Path (2010)- Atocha is Lerner’s first major foray into prose fiction. The Quixote syndrome, where a person suffers for a belief that the world outside is supposed to conform to the uncanny logic of fictional worlds, has been a recurrent trope in fiction since its seventeenth-century debut. ![]() We know all too well what can happen when a person reads too many novels. ![]()
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