A wonderful read! Author Ondaatje's style of writing is beautiful. What a lovely adventure about a boy traveling from Colombo to England alone. I absolutely enjoyed the story that was told aboard the ship during its journey, but not so much the flashes into the future where the death of his friend o...
Like all of Ondaatje's other books that I've read, I loved the characters developed in this book and the complicated elements of their biographies. In this book, I wished a bit more plot development would have pulled the story along, particularly in the early stages.
At 91 pages I gave up. How can one go through 25% of a book and provide no discernible hook? Just a bunch of minor characters coming and going and no compelling plot. Maybe it starts on page 92, but I've got other things to do. I have loved a number of Ondaatje's books, but in this even his prose co...
I found this one interesting to read, and it reminded me a bit about my own travels by cruise ship. While I found some of it impossible to believe seriously, it was still good, and where it worked was in the varied characters that the three boys encounter. The ones that I found most interesting were...
I finished Michael Ondaatje's "The Cat's Table" today. Gorgeous. He's an absolute master of prose, imo. Though he writes that the book is fiction, it reads almost as a mix of an autobiographical rememberance of a series of events (centered around a ship voyage from Ceylon to Britain when the protago...
The Cat's Table is the lowest table on the social order of an ocean liner - basically the kiddie's table of the most un-important. At this table, the main character of the story, Michael (or Mynah) finds companions on a 21 day long cruise from Ceylon to England. He is alone (except for a neglect...
This book is a literary .zip file. You know the files that you press "execute" or "unzip" and the small file unfolds itself over and over until it becomes a much larger file? This rather small book (my edition said 280 some odd pages) is like that. What starts as a small story about a three week ...
It's a four-star book with five stars. I'll explain in a minute.I'm still thinking on the Cat's Table. I've enjoyed Ondaatje's poetry more than his novels and this book seems to straddle those categories a bit. He writes beautifully on the visual and emotional fronts. He structures long works creati...
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