Given these days of political turmoil and agitation, I thought you might enjoy the last paragraph of a review of Ben Lerner’s new (and apparently first) novel, “Leaving the the Atocha Station.” (The reviewer, Gary Sernovitz, compares it to another novel about an American living in Spain, The Sun Also Rises.)
“In the final scene of “The Sun Also Rises,” Jake Barnes, in Madrid, rides in a taxi with Lady Ashley, both more broken than when the novel began and both just as alone. The book ends with Barnes’s ironic, stoic, tragic response to Ashley’s wistful insistence that they could have had a good time together: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Eighty years later, in that same city, Adam Gordon concludes his story with more hope: “Teresa would read the originals and I would read the translations and the translations would become the originals as we read. Then I planned to live forever in a skylit room surrounded by my friends.” Whether it’s dangerously naïve or necessarily modest for Americans, in life, in foreign policy, to seek that skylit room is an open question. But as a dream that more collaborative days are ahead of us, well, isn’t it pretty to think so?” The entire review is here.
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