RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksI love to death his new book, Leaving the Atocha Station, which is nominally a novel but thick with roman à clef references … If the actual were ever to replace art, he’d swallow a bottle of white pills. If he can’t believe in poetry, he’ll close up shop … The very nature of language itself is a major part of Adam’s problem; he’s unable to settle on the right word in English, unable to understand Spanish, revels in mistranslation as a close approximation of the incomprehensible human flux … If Ben cares about ‘the arts,’ it’s only to measure the distance between his experience of the actual works and the claims made on their behalf.
