Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

When chunks of Spanish conversation become hard to follow he zones out, leaving his face to enact the role of involved listener and participant. Young couples are seen 'displaying their mutual absorption on nearly every bench' Adam and a girlfriend see themselves 'reflected vaguely in the silver of passing buses.'īewildered, lacking motivation, filled with tides of rage that never manifest themselves in action, he becomes part of the art-poetry-stoner crowd. Or was it cloudy?' And yet the apprehended city floats before the reader with a limpid and oneiric grace: a self-portrait in a constantly distorting mirror. Adam drifts, benumbed and stoned, through a Madrid that sometimes fails to match the depths of his self-absorption: 'I left the hotel and walked into the sun. Meursault is trapped in the sun-dazzle of the moment. Adam Gordon suffers frequently from linguistic dislocation and – permanently – from bipolarity which he self-medicates with a cocktail of prescription drugs, coffee, nicotine, booze and marijuana. The narrator, Meursault, is a French Algerian whose mother is reported dead in the famous opening sentence later, on a beach, he will murder someone – an Arab, as the song by the Cure reminded us in 1979 – for almost no reason.īen Lerner's remarkable first novel is narrated by a different kind of outsider: a young American living in Madrid on a poetry scholarship in 2004. S eventy years ago Albert Camus published the novel known in English as The Outsider: a short and vivid monologue that – I remember this from school – doubles as some kind of philosophical manifesto.

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner