Why a Booktrail?
2004 – Follow the life of a self-obsessed young poet on a fellowship in Spain just before and after the bombing in Madrid.
Leaving the Atocha Station
What you need to know before your trail
Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid.
He’s supposed to be there in order to do some serious research, but this is far from what really happens when he sets foot in the city. Instead he takes drugs, thinks about himself and tells one lie after another. He’s having his own kind of gap year.
‘Leaving the Atocha Station’ is the title is taken from a poem by John Ashbery, one of the poet’s Adam greatly admires.
And then the 2004 Madrid train bombings happen…
Travel Guide
Wandering around the city, this poet can come across as rather self absorbed and his thoughts on art can be confusing. The bombing at the Atocha station is an event which takes place in the background of Adam’s life and one which seems to illustrate how life seems to be passing him by.
Adam Gordon is wasting a very good and valuable fellowship by smoking dope and stumbling around Madrid both literally and figuratively. He wanders in and out of Madrid’s society, testing everyone and everything he meets.
He wants and searches for a relationship with art but his inner conflict is his only companion as he constantly questions the people he meets and tries to get others to sleep with him.
His failure to learn Spanish is laughable – he is constantly unable to express what he feels and wants to say. A man who can neither express an emotion or have one.
Not the best use or example of a gap year we’ve ever seen. Certainly not when you’re in the middle of the city when bombs explode in the central station.
For further information on the bombings in Madrid – 2004 – http://news.bbc.co.uk/Madrid
Where Next?
