After reading Ben Lerner’s debut novel I searched out John Ashberry’s poem of the same name.

A hadn’t read either Ashberry’s poem nor Lerner’s for that matter.

Nor had I made the connection between Ashberry’s poem and the setting for the 2004 terrorist attack at the Madrid train station of the same name. But I do sense a kinship between the two as Ashberry’s poetry clangs like the explosions in the tunnels.

More than 190 people died in the attack.

So what is the connection between the poem, the explosion, and poet about whom this novel is centred?

Fragments of the story tie in directly to Lerner’s lived experience. His mother and father appear as characters by the narrator, although they are the stuff of lies he tells a woman to gain her confidence.

The narrator is a poet so different from the swaggering Jake Barnes of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises to whom he is compared.

This writer is on tranquilizers, is constantly smoking hash or grass, and is drunk most of the time. He considers himself a fraud. He pretends that his Spanish is rudimentary, and he fears his translator will discover that he is no poet at all.

His friends think otherwise.

The themes are familiar, the setting exotic to a N. American audience, and the narrator as spoiled and dishonest as J.P. Donleavy’s Ginger Man.

What is new is our understanding of the mind and the constructions he makes to make sense of his blurry landscape, grabbing from memory what he makes of himself and filling in the rest with not what is real, but what will work.

This is what we know of the mind today.

When the terrorist attacks galvanize the opposition on the eve of a national election, the narrator’s friends act as one. To them it is history in the making. He is not a part of this history, or only the history of poetry.
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Adam Gordon disfruta de una prestigiosa beca en Madrid para llevar a cabo lo que él grandilocuentemente llama "proyecto poético". Sin embargo, también trata de desentrañar su identidad, así como su relación con el arte. Animado por cantidades ingentes de café que rebaja con tranquilizantes que él mismo se prescribe, la búsqueda de Adam le llevará a conocer una ciudad que está a punto de vivir un importante capítulo de su historia.

A young man's memoir (prose),....he is a Fulbright Poet writing about his experiences in Spain, he is sort of a pot-smoker who dates artists and feels like a fraud and... as a witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and aftermath, continues his self-critical evaluation. Tries to figure out if he is participating in historical events or just watching them pass by.

I thought it was interesting he would write prose, while his true expression is poetry. I did not enjoy his story or voice, although slowly learned to like the book overall based on his honesty and critical self-audit on all things.

It does have the dead-weight of a the Brooklyn metro-sexual tone of one bored intellectual who actually doesn't have many life experiences, while able to self-criticize as though they are major contributions to self and us all.

In that sense, I was disinterested; however wanted to broaden my mind. Which this book achieved in doing. I ended up seeing his perspective and being less irritated by people holding this personality type....
Not because i am sympathetic, but do enjoy reading the mind-conversation.

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I'm glad I read this several years ago, as my current willingness to read about difficult and oblivious white men is SUPER LOW. But at the time, I enjoyed the unreliable narrative aspect and then general meandering-ness of the story and lack of lessons being learned. ( )

A book I loved and felt connected with on a deep level. The way the main character described his interactions with people carried a sense of real alienation, and a consciousness of that alienation, that I completely identified with. Lerner writes his character's social life so convincingly, so piercingly.

It was not an irreverent book, but there were moments of extreme whimsy, or perhaps just sharp randomness, that felt faithful to the amorphous condition of humans' personalities and their interactions. And I very much identified with how lost, purposeless and dependent the main character was. He handled philosophical questions in an intensely interesting way, provoking thoughts that I have about my own life constantly and about art and literature and poetry that I have also played with.

The writing was precise but moved in waves, like a real thought process -- propelled forward, idea after idea, by a "sheer directionality". The setting -- Madrid -- was only icing on the cake. A great book. ( )