The Cat's Table
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Review
`Every now and then a graphic novel comes along that completely blows me away. Ascent is one of these.' --Amazon
`The Cat's Table deserves to be recognized for the beauty and poetry of its writing: pages that lull you with their carefully constructed rhythm, sailing you effortlessly from chapter to chapter and leaving you bereft when forced to disembark at the novel's end.'
--Telegraph Magazine
`Ondaatje's great achievement is demonstrating that fiction can be stranger than truth'. --Spectator
`This novel is written with Ondaatje's usual poeticism'. --Scotland on Sunday
`Grace, humanity and despairing romance are central to the art of Michael Ondaatje. Although the narrative flutters and sighs and even drifts, this is such an attractive, melancholic and engaging work of connections and disconnections that it does not matter.' --Irish Times Weekend Review
`an eloquent, elegiac tribute to the game of youth and how it shapes what follows... Ultimately, Ondaatje has created a beautiful and poetic study here of what it means to have your very existence metaphorically, as well as literally, all at sea.' --The Independent on Sunday
`No one who has read a novel or poem by Ondaatje can easily forget its powerful imagery. In this, too, the new novel is characteristic... Ondaatje admits in an author's note that, although The Cat's Table is a work of fiction, it has "the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography". This may explain why his wondrous prose feels more alive to the world than ever before'.
--Financial Times
`Ondaatje has hit the nail on the head with this book, a beautiful analysis of transient subjects of gazes, dreams and memory.' --Time Out
`The author of The English Patient conjures up a cast of eccentric and fascinating characters.' --Psychologies Magazine
`Michael Ondaatje's impressive new novel, containing dreams and fantasy between a ship's flanks...is, in the most etymological way, a wonderful novel: one full of wonders.' --Daily Telegraph Review Supplement
`the novel tells of a journey from childhood to the adult world, as well as a passage from the homeland to another country, something of a Dantean experience. The constriction of space intensifies a sense of allegory as a frame surrounding a painting.' --Saturday Guardian
`His accuracy in showing us the territory of our own lives remains breathtaking.' --GQ --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
`The Cat's Table deserves to be recognized for the beauty and poetry of its writing: pages that lull you with their carefully constructed rhythm, sailing you effortlessly from chapter to chapter and leaving you bereft when forced to disembark at the novel's end.'
--Telegraph Magazine
`Ondaatje's great achievement is demonstrating that fiction can be stranger than truth'. --Spectator
`This novel is written with Ondaatje's usual poeticism'. --Scotland on Sunday
`Grace, humanity and despairing romance are central to the art of Michael Ondaatje. Although the narrative flutters and sighs and even drifts, this is such an attractive, melancholic and engaging work of connections and disconnections that it does not matter.' --Irish Times Weekend Review
`an eloquent, elegiac tribute to the game of youth and how it shapes what follows... Ultimately, Ondaatje has created a beautiful and poetic study here of what it means to have your very existence metaphorically, as well as literally, all at sea.' --The Independent on Sunday
`No one who has read a novel or poem by Ondaatje can easily forget its powerful imagery. In this, too, the new novel is characteristic... Ondaatje admits in an author's note that, although The Cat's Table is a work of fiction, it has "the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography". This may explain why his wondrous prose feels more alive to the world than ever before'.
--Financial Times
`Ondaatje has hit the nail on the head with this book, a beautiful analysis of transient subjects of gazes, dreams and memory.' --Time Out
`The author of The English Patient conjures up a cast of eccentric and fascinating characters.' --Psychologies Magazine
`Michael Ondaatje's impressive new novel, containing dreams and fantasy between a ship's flanks...is, in the most etymological way, a wonderful novel: one full of wonders.' --Daily Telegraph Review Supplement
`the novel tells of a journey from childhood to the adult world, as well as a passage from the homeland to another country, something of a Dantean experience. The constriction of space intensifies a sense of allegory as a frame surrounding a painting.' --Saturday Guardian
`His accuracy in showing us the territory of our own lives remains breathtaking.' --GQ --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Book Description
From the acclaimed author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion: a stunningly beautiful and moving new novel about a boy's life-changing journey from Ceylon to England in the 1950s.
--This text refers to the
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
As ever with Ondaatje you get a beautifully written, complexly structured novel, which is easy and pleasurable to read. This novel is even easier since it is so short but fails to be quite as engaging as some of his other works. Some of that can perhaps be put down to the style which is intentionally languid to simulate the dissociation of a three week sea voyage, but is intercut with intersecting stories which spin out into the past and future to significantly widen the scope of the book. As other reviewers have pointed out it does take some time to get going but once the disparate strands begin to weave back in together it becomes difficult to put down. I would definitely recommend but would sugges "In the Skin of a Lion" as the better introduction to Ondaatje's work.
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is the story of a three week journey in 1954 from Ceylon to England by sea. Michael is 11, and is leaving the only country he has ever known. Travelling alone, he quickly befriends two other boys of his age and the three of them spend the weeks exploring the ship, spying on their fellow passengers and generally getting up to mischief. Despite the fact that there are many similarities between the author's own story and the fictional Michael, this is apparently fictional. The book has a dreamy, timeless quality - the journey seems much longer than three weeks, which is probably how it would have felt to an 11 year old. Events that happened for a few days would stretch in the memory. The narrator himself comments that his memory is unreliable, which heightens the sense of unreality that permeates the pages.
I'm finding it very hard to know how to rate this book. It's short and easy enough to read, but it took me almost a month to get through. The writing is beautiful, even poetic, but there is very little in the way of a plot. Instead we get little vignettes about this passenger or that passenger, which are pleasant but never gave me the urge to pick the book up again and to read more. Towards the end some of the disparate strands do come together, but I think what will stay with me is not the characters, nor the storyline, but the impressions of a particular place in time. I'm glad I read it, but it's not a book I would hand to a friend and say "you must read this".
I'm finding it very hard to know how to rate this book. It's short and easy enough to read, but it took me almost a month to get through. The writing is beautiful, even poetic, but there is very little in the way of a plot. Instead we get little vignettes about this passenger or that passenger, which are pleasant but never gave me the urge to pick the book up again and to read more. Towards the end some of the disparate strands do come together, but I think what will stay with me is not the characters, nor the storyline, but the impressions of a particular place in time. I'm glad I read it, but it's not a book I would hand to a friend and say "you must read this".
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
The cat's table is "the least privileged place" in the dining room aboard an ocean liner bound for Tilbury from Ceylon in 1954. The narrator, Michael , recalls how, as an eleven-year-old, this is where he meets not just two other unaccompanied boys, but a group of eccentric adults. In the accurate belief that they are invisible, at least until their mischief brings them to the captain's notice, these three racket around, experiencing the complex life of a ship, straying below deck and into first class, eavesdropping as they lie hidden in the lifeboats where they gorge the emergency chocolate rations, getting involved in bizarre events, hearing quirky, often unsuitable anecdotes, all of this related in short chapters which add to the fragmented, dreamlike quality of the voyage.
The "main plot" of the story, which revolves round a mysterious shackled prisoner who is brought out for exercise at night, proves rather thin and implausible with an unsatisfying ending, yet does not appear to be the author's main concern.
The novel seems to be mostly about the nature of memory and the way people relate to one another, so that fleeting impressions, brief incidents and passing friendships from early life may prove unexpectedly enduring and significant in adulthood.
I found the description of the voyage and numerous rambling into vignettes very evocative and absorbing. Less satisfactory are the frequent "flash forwards" to Michael's later life. His adult relationships with his cousin Emily and with his friend's sister Massi do not prove as convincing and moving as I think they are intended to be.
It is interesting to speculate to what extent the events of the voyage make Michael permanently mistrustful , someone who breaks too "easily away from intimacy", although having rather distant parents and uncaring relatives who think it in order to send him unaccompanied on a long voyage is probably the main reason.
Overall, this is an unusual novel which lingers in one's mind. It is brilliant in ways that will differ according to the reader's own cast of thought. An example of this for me is the description of the night-time sailing through the Suez canal, which years later Michael's friend Cassius captures in paintings which only Michael can appreciate have been drawn "from the exact angle of vision Cassius and I had that night". I like the humour in Michael's list of the irascible captain's "crimes committed (so far)" most of which are actually the children's fault. However, the tale is also flawed when some allusion or plot development misses the mark or falls flat.
The "main plot" of the story, which revolves round a mysterious shackled prisoner who is brought out for exercise at night, proves rather thin and implausible with an unsatisfying ending, yet does not appear to be the author's main concern.
The novel seems to be mostly about the nature of memory and the way people relate to one another, so that fleeting impressions, brief incidents and passing friendships from early life may prove unexpectedly enduring and significant in adulthood.
I found the description of the voyage and numerous rambling into vignettes very evocative and absorbing. Less satisfactory are the frequent "flash forwards" to Michael's later life. His adult relationships with his cousin Emily and with his friend's sister Massi do not prove as convincing and moving as I think they are intended to be.
It is interesting to speculate to what extent the events of the voyage make Michael permanently mistrustful , someone who breaks too "easily away from intimacy", although having rather distant parents and uncaring relatives who think it in order to send him unaccompanied on a long voyage is probably the main reason.
Overall, this is an unusual novel which lingers in one's mind. It is brilliant in ways that will differ according to the reader's own cast of thought. An example of this for me is the description of the night-time sailing through the Suez canal, which years later Michael's friend Cassius captures in paintings which only Michael can appreciate have been drawn "from the exact angle of vision Cassius and I had that night". I like the humour in Michael's list of the irascible captain's "crimes committed (so far)" most of which are actually the children's fault. However, the tale is also flawed when some allusion or plot development misses the mark or falls flat.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Cleverly constructed and beautifully written, as always.
On reading this I wondered if any of it was based on fact - it read at first as if it might be with a boy 'Michael' sailing on his own from Ceylon to the UK, forming new... Read more
Published 2 months ago by A. I. McCulloch
Beautiful, wistful
This is a fictional account given by an eleven year old boy sailing from Sri Lanka to England, to meet a mother he barely remembers. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Four Violets
Good book
Arrived promptly as present for my mother, who is enjoying it immensely. She would recommend it and so do I.
Published 4 months ago by Charles Jenkins
Famous writer recalls his 1954 ship voyage from Colombo to London
This is my first reading of MO, whose style I liked instantly. Short chapters with stories within, released in short bursts, with the end result superior to its constituent parts. Read more
Published 4 months ago by P. A. Doornbos
Evocative vignettes loosely threaded together
Ondaatje writes wonderfully, and this novel is a pleasure to read for that reason alone. With short chapters and a loose storyline seen through the eyes of the author's fictional... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Max
The Cat's Table
This beautifully written novel is very evocative of the time period in which the action is set - a voyage during the 1950s from Ceylon to a new life in England. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Marand
I wished the journey had gone on for a bit longer
Okay, lot's of reviews. Many of which I would agree with. Let's try and add something to them...
My initial impression was slightly awkward, perhaps a little unusual. Read more
My initial impression was slightly awkward, perhaps a little unusual. Read more
Published 5 months ago by N. A. Bakhshov
The Cat's Whiskers
Michael Ondaatje has written an excellent novel which, although he says in the author's note is entirely fictional, seems to be steeped in autobiographical nostalgia. Read more
Published 6 months ago by J. Scott-mandeville
"What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places...
(4.5 stars) Setting his latest novel on a passenger ship going between Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and London in 1954, Michael Ondaatje writes his most accessible, and, in... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Mary Whipple
Wonderfully lyrical tale about a boy's adventures during a three-week...
The main part of the narrative spans a three-week sea voyage from Ceylon to England in the mid 1950s, viewed from the point of view of 10-year-old Michael, nicknamed Mynah. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Minnilux
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