![]() ![]() ![]() Gordon worries that he is a fraud–and maybe he is. I like it. Here, Gordon is supposed to be working on a research-intensive poem on the Spanish Civil War but instead, he roams around, visits museums and gets high. His debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), is about a poet called Adam Gordon, who grew up in Kansas, attended Brown and is living in Madrid on a fellowship. So I ended up reading Lerner’s other book too and a whole lot of his essays.īen Lerner himself is a poet who grew up in Kansas, attended Brown University and travelled to Madrid on a Fulbright scholarship. Doubtless, it is a brilliant novel, but after I finished the book I couldn’t help thinking if I was the victim of a joke of some sort. 10:04 is a novel which lies in the gray area between kidding and not kidding in the sense that it is not strictly a work of fiction or non-fiction, but a metafiction which is fixated with the mysterious transformation which makes life into art. In retrospect, this line was like a warning shot. After this extremely empathic occurrence, the narrator clarifies: “ I am kidding and I am not kidding.” Ben Lerner’s critically acclaimed new novel, 10:04, opens with the narrator walking along High Line Park in Manhattan with his literary agent after having shared a meal of baby octopus “ massaged to death” in salt, and he experiences a “ succession of images, sensations and memories” which don’t belong to him, but to the octopus: polarized light, a “ conflation of taste and touch as salt was rubbed into the suction cups“. ![]()
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