Leaving the Atocha Station: Luminously original, like a comet from the future! by Ben Lerner.

Nothing is more American than running away to Europe, avoiding your countryfolk, pretending not to be American. Our narrator really hates the would-be expatriate intellectuals «who, when they spoke Spanish, exaggerated the peninsular lisp». And hates them mostly – as will be obvious – because he is one of them himself.

Leaving the Atocha Station is Ben Lerner’s first novel. Before it, he published three well received books of small-press modernist poetr. And probably no one will be surprised to hear that he has indeed spent a year doing some sort of research in Madrid.