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The Cat's Table (2011)

by Michael Ondaatje(Favorite Author)

3.58 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0224093614 (ISBN13: 9780224093613)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Jonathan Cape

review 1: His writing is simply beautiful. In this semi autobiographic novel, we take a 21 day ship journey with the author as a young boy about to be a man. The time, place, and experience comes beautifully to life. What an adventure! The words magic and magical keep coming to mind, but this is not a magical realism book. We are transported by the writing to the magic we regularly encounter when we are young and take the time to notice. Well worth reading....
review 2: I was already a fan of Ondaatje; I love his lyrical, evocative style. If you're not a fan of Ondaatje, you probably won't like this book, because there isn't really much to it apart from his style, but it's very lovely. It's a dreamy, slow book where nothing much happens, which suits Ondaatje; it's ... morewritten as a memoir of a voyage from Sri Lanka to England taken by a boy in the late 50s to meet his mother, and it's about his roamings with two other non-accompanied boys, the adults around them and the mysteries that gradually unfold over the course of the voyage, the life of the ship, interspersed with memories of what happened later and his experiences of being an immigrant in England and, later, Canada. It's kind of a coming-of-age story. I'm not sure how much the book is semi-autobiographical; it claims not, but the protagonist is 'Michael' and it's told as if from the POV of the adult Michael Ondaatje. That doesn't matter much. Anyway, I really enjoyed this book; there isn't much attempt at plot, just a mystery that sort of rambles along, and there's a lot of the moments of ephemeral strangeness that Ondaatje likes so much. Some really gorgeous set-pieces, like going through the Suez Canal at midnight. less

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