Review: Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

You may have already noticed, but I’m a big fan of Leaving the Atocha Station . In fact, I haven’t been this excited about a book in quite a long time. What is it about the novel that appeals to me? I’m not sure I know. But I’ll take a crack at it.

• First off, I’m a big sucker for expat stories: American poetry fellow abroad in Spain?- check.
• I love meta fiction, in particular books about writers writing (or struggling to write): a main character who fears (knows?) his hackneyed rip-off poetry makes him a literary imposter? – check.
• I love beautiful, witty writing- check and check.
• And I have a huge soft spot for loveable losers- in this case a main character, Adam Gordon, who is in some ways so supremely self-confident, yet plagued by doubts and miscues at every turn- check.

This last factor is, I think, what makes the story work so well. Adam is, for all intents and purposes, a hash-smoking doofus who finds himself in over his head. He’s an intelligent doofus, but he’s a doofus. He coasts by in spite of half-understood exchanges with the Spanish locals. He lies compulsively, as when he tells people his mother is dead, or that his father is a fascist, then flashes to a mental image of his dad, “gentlest of men,” coaxing a spider onto a piece of paper so he can carry the lost creature outside the house to safety. He sabotages relationships and seems set on submarining his own fellowship. His entire purpose in Spain is to research the Spanish Civil War and produce an epic poem on the topic, yet when the Madrid train bombings take place right in front of his eyes, he is oblivious to history:

"I leaned my head against the wheel and felt the full force of my shame. I wasn’t capable of fetching coffee in this country, let alone understanding its civil war. I hadn’t even seen the Alhambra. I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American… I was a pothead, maybe an alcoholic. When history came alive, I was sleeping at the Ritz."

But miraculously, things work out for our flawed hero. He stumbles into meaningful friendships completely by accident. His anti-social screw-ups are accepted as the eccentricities of a creative genius. The two or three lines he memorizes for a panel discussion on current events magically fall into place as the most insightful comments of the night.

"They wanted the input of a young American poet writing and reading abroad and wasn’t that what I was, not just what I was pretending to be? Maybe only my fraudulence was fraudulent."

I have to be honest, I thought the story was headed for a depressing, turd-in-the-punchbowl ending- a suicide, or an epic academic flameout that would ruin Adam’s career, but I couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised. Things are left ambiguous, to be sure, but the trajectory is enough to imply a happy ending.

It is an entertaining, thought-provoking, and ultimately uplifting read. Highly, highly recommended.

From the Pen of Ben Lerner

It’s been a while since I finished Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station , but that doesn’t mean I’m through with it yet. I flipped back through it looking at some of the highlights I’d made along the way, and realized it’s hard to convey just how hilarious this book is based on a mere passage or two. But here’s one example that gives you a sense for the main character’s Byzantine self-awareness and his amusing disdain for those around him:

"I opened my eyes a little more widely than normal, opened them to a very specific point, raising my eyebrows and also allowing my mouth to curl up in the implication of a smile. I held this look steady once it had obtained, a look that communicated incredulity cut with familiarity, a boredom arrested only by a vaguely anthropological interest in my surroundings, a look that contained a dose of contempt I hoped could be read as political, as insinuating that, after a frivolous night, I would be returning to the front lines of some struggle that would render whatever I experienced in such company null. The goal of this look was to make my insufficiencies appear chosen, to give my unstylish hair and clothes the force of protest; I was a figure for the outside to this life, I had known it and rejected it and now was back as an ambassador from a reality more immediate and just.

"There ensued a battle between the music and my face."

But even when he’s not being funny, he shows a poet’s flare for injecting his lines and paragraphs with phrases that bring the whole thing to life like so many lighted fuses:

"While I thought of myself as superior to all the carousal I was in fact desperate for some form of participation both because I was terribly bored at night and because I was undeniably attracted to the air’s vulgar libidinal charge."

"While I had never thought I was in love with Teresa, whatever that might mean, I had on more than one occasion thought that she was maybe a little in love with me. And if we never slept together or otherwise “realized” our relationship, I would leave Spain with this gorgeous possibility intact, and in my memory could always ponder the relationship I might have had in the flattering light of the subjunctive."

"My mind was revising many months’ worth of assumptions; I felt something like a physical change as my recent past liquefied and reformed. What was left of the light burnished what it touched; Isabel was half shadow and half bronze, boundless and bounded."

"Teresa made a joke and they laughed and the many-headed laughter was terrible to me."

"Elena Lopez Portillo had ceased to speak and I could feel a change in pressure on my face, the effect of the audience focusing its eyes upon me." 

Good stuff, right? I’ll review the whole thing tomorrow.

Find your way to Oz

Okay, if you’re a fan of L. Frank Baum, or a user of Google’s Chrome browser, you may get a kick out of this cool site to promote Disney’s upcoming movie “Oz the Great and Powerful.” It’s basically an HTML5 video game, where you can wander around a travelling circus, explore various tents, take a hot-air balloon ride and, if you get too close to the twister, maybe even find yourself transported to the land of Oz.

Chrome users, go here.

For those of you with some other browser, here is a quick preview to give you a flavor for what you’re missing:

Another Month in the Can

We only covered about 20 different authors this month, but since we only post about twenty times in a month, that’s not too shabby- especially considering the huge, heaping helpings of Heller we heaved upon you. Here are the top 5 posts from the past thirty days:

• Slovene Literature, Geopolitics and Video Games, oh my!
• First Line Friday: Stage Directions
• Title Chase: Catch-22
• What Bugs Me Wednesday: The War on Style
• Le Mot Juste- Without a Thesaurus

And here, as usual, are some of the nutty search terms that led people to us:

“Death in Wuthering Heights”  >>  Well, we’ve done death of  Wuthering Heights

“Death in Brave New World”  >>  Um, we killed that one off, too

“Bosch garden of earthly delights”  >>  Enjoy a profound experience of art

“Man playing video games”  >>  We’ve done exactly three posts on video games.

“Sgt. Pepper’s Album”  >>  Why yes, of course we’ve covered that.

“Beast of Burden poem”  >>  I really hope the reader got something out of this parody poem

“edith newbold jones Wharton”  >>  Ah yes, our keeping up with the Joneses post.

“8-bit ham”  >>  How about the 8-bit Fitzgerald?

“Fiction town map coloring page” >>  Well, I guess you could use this for that.

“Modern library”  >>  The famous list that we sliced and diced here.

Thanks for visiting. Keep coming back!

Happy Friday!

Review: Catch-22, by Joseph Heller

I remember reading sections of Catch-22  in highschool English, but I hadn’t gone back to read the whole thing until a week or two ago. It’s a book that comes in at #7 on the Modern Library’s list of 100 greatest novels, and whether or not you agree with that ranking, I think it’s safe to say that it belongs on the list. I mentioned this yesterday, but I think Heller gets unfairly pidgeonholed as a whacky satirist rather than as a top-notch writer or a storyteller.

Still, there’s no denying the man has a knack for humor. Take the prosaic progression and punchline in this line, for example:

"There was a urologist for his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for his derma, there was a pathologist for his pathos, a cystologist for his cysts, and a bald and pedantic Cetologist from the zoology department at Harvard, who had been shanghaied ruthlessly into the medical corps by a faulty anode in an IBM machine and spent his sessions with the dying colonel trying to discuss Moby Dick with him."

The absurdity of a poor cetologist landing in the medical corps near the frontlines of WWII is typical of the crazy conundrums that fill the novel- from Milo Minderbinder’s syndicate (Everybody’s got a share!) to the political maneuvers of the dastardly military brass.

There were  a couple spots where the attempt at humor gets to be a little much, where the dialogue starts to resemble an old Abbott & Costello or Groucho Marx routine, where every line is a punchline, but by and large the satire is hilarious and effective.

And here’s what I really loved about the book. The chapters present a disjointed and non-chronological timeline where past events are referred to, then placed like puzzle pieces into greater context, and finally dealt with in-depth later on in the narrative- some of it a pretty gruesome counterpoint to the funny material that surrounds it. It all has the effect of throwing the reader into the same confusing and seemingly endless loop that the characters themselves are stuck in- with one key exception: the ever-climbing number of combat missions the men are required to fly. This last fact provides a common thread for the entire book, and gives an ominous crescendo to the unfolding action. It’s brilliant how it all comes together.

From the Pen of Joseph Heller

For all the attention Catch-22 gets for being a "hardee har har," laugh-a-minute, military  satire, I think Joseph Heller often gets short shrift as a wordsmith. Here are just a few highlights from my recent turn through his masterpiece. All highlights are mine. They're just a few of the lines that struck me as particularly powerful.

The only end in sight was Yossarian’s own, and he might have remained in the hospital until doomsday had it not been for that patriotic Texan with his infundibuliform jowls and his lumpy, rumple-headed indestructible smile, cracked forever across the front of his face like the brim of a black ten-gallon hat.

Havermeyer was the best damn bombardier they had, but he flew straight and level all the way from the IP to the target, and even far beyond the target until he saw the falling bombs strike ground and explode in a darting spurt of abrupt orange, that flashed beneath the swirling pall of smoke and pulverized debris geysering up wildly in huge rolling waves of gray and black.

Each day’s delay deepened the awareness and deepened the gloom. The clinging, overpowering conviction of death spread steadily with the continuing rainfall, soaking mordantly into each man’s ailing countenance like the corrosive blot of some crawling disease. Everyone smelled of formaldehyde.

Major _ _ DeCoverly was a splendid, awe-inspiring, grave old man with a massive, leonine head and an angry shock of wild white hair that raged like a blizzard around his stern, patriarchal face.

Major _ _ DeCoverly straightened with astonishment at Milo’s affrontery and concentrated upon him the full  fury of his storming countenance with its rugged overhang of gullied forehead, and huge crag of a hump-backed nose that came charging out of his face wrathfully like a Big 10 fullback.

Along the ground suddenly on both sides of the path he saw dozens of new mushrooms the rain had spawned, poking their nodular fingers up through the clammy earth like lifeless stocks of flesh, sprouting in such necrotic profusion everywhere he looked that they seemed to be proliferating right before his eyes.

Poet's Corner: Thomas R. Smith

Ode to the Vinyl Record

by Thomas R. Smith (all emphasis is mine)

The needle lowers into the groove
and I'm home. It could be any record
I've lived with and loved a long time: Springsteen
or Rodrigo, Ray Charles or Emmylou
Harris: Not only the music, but
the whirlpool shimmering on the turntable
funneling blackly down into the ocean
of the ear—even the background
pops and hisses a worn record
wraps the music in creaturely
imperfections so hospitable to our own.
Since those first Beatles and Stones LPs
plopped down spindles on record players
we opened like tiny suitcases at sweaty
junior high parties while parents were out,
how many nights I've pulled around 
my desires a vinyl record's cloak
of flaws and found it a perfect fit,
the crackling unclarity and turbulence
of the country's lo-fi basement heart
madly spinning, making its big dark sound.

That’s pretty good. There’s almost a dash of Kerouac in the rhythm of some of the lines, especially the last couple, that really does it for me. You can really hear the crackle and hiss, and see the glassy threads turning.

What They Were Reading: William Faulkner

INTERVIEWER

Do you read your contemporaries?

FAULKNER

No, the books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends: the Old Testament, Dickens, Conrad, Cervantes, Don Quixote—I read that every year, as some do the Bible. Flaubert, Balzac—he created an intact world of his own, a bloodstream running through twenty books—Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare. I read Melville occasionally and, of the poets, Marlowe, Campion, Jonson, Herrick, Donne, Keats, and Shelley. I still read Housman. I've read these books so often that I don't always begin at page one and read on to the end. I just read one scene, or about one character, just as you'd meet and talk to a friend for a few minutes.

-from the Art of Fiction No. 12

Happy Friday!

Well, as far as I can tell this is only a concept put together to sell the digital track, so you can’t get in there and play it like you could with this game. Still, it’ll be worth a couple minutes to the Downton Abbey fans out there: