Because of the shortness of February we decided to move our book club meeting to the first of March. Our reading selection this time was suggested by Beth : The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje (of The English Patient, fame).
Here is a excerpt of what the New York Times book review writer Liesl Schillenger (Oct, 2011) had to say-
In “The Cat’s Table,” Ondaatje seems to lead the reader on a journey through three deeply submerged weeks in his own memory — from the year 1954, when, at age 11, he traveled on the ocean liner Oronsay from Colombo, in what was then Ceylon, to England, a passage that would lead him from his past to his future self. As the novel opens, prominent passengers are granted seats at the captain’s table, but young Michael (nicknamed Mynah) and the two boys he befriends, Cassius (a troublemaker) and Ramadhin (a contemplative asthmatic), are relegated to a table of dubious characters: a mute tailor, a retired ship dismantler, a pianist who has “hit the skids,” a botanist and a lady who hides pigeons in the pockets of her jacket, and reads thrillers in her deck chair, flinging them overboard when they bore her. It’s the pigeon lady who remarks that theirs is “the cat’s table” since “we’re in the least privileged place.”
This turns out to be a matter of perspective...
So convincing is Ondaatje’s evocation of his narrator’s experience that the reader could easily mistake it for the author’s own. But in a note at the end of the book Ondaatje takes pains to establish that “The Cat’s Table” is “fictional,” though it “sometimes uses the coloring and locations of memoir and autobiography.” This disclaimer will not keep the reader from reflecting that any life so richly recounted belongs more to fiction than fact.
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