"The Cat's Table" by Michael Ondaatje ****

• October 2014 Book Club selection
• Sri Lankin author
• Originally published in 2011
• Setting:  aboard the Oronsay from Ceylon to England via Aden, the Suez Canal
• Epigraph:  "And this is how I see the East...I see it always from a small boat - not a light, not a stir, not a sound.  We conversed in low whispers, as if afraid to wake up the land... t is all in that moment when I opened my young eyes on it.  I came  upon it from a tussle with the sea." - Joseph Conrad, "Youth"
• Vocabulary:
• coelacanth:  a crossopterygian fish, Latimeria chalumnae, thought to have been extinct since the Cretaceous Period but found in 1938 off the coast of southern Africa.  
• mangosteen:  the juicy, edible fruit of an East Indian tree
• Characters:l
• Michael:  age 11, narrator, nickname on board was "Mynah"
• Cassius:  his buddy, became an artist
• Ramadhin:  his buddy, gentle soul, died young
• Mr. Mazappa:  played with the ship's orchestra
• Mr. Nevil:  ship dismantler
• Emily de Saram:  distant cousin
• Miss Lasqueti:  ?
• Flavia Prins:  ?
• Mysterious prisoner:  murdered a judge?
• Massoumeh/Massi:  Ramadhin's sister, eventually wife of Michael, then divorced
• Larry Daniels:  botanist
• Narayan: family manservant
• Gunepala:  family cook
• Mr. Fonseca:  travelling to England to be a teacher, smoked hemp
• Sir Hector de Silva:  cursed to die by dog bite
• Vocabulary:
• Quotes:
• p.4..."He could hear singing and imagined the slow and then eager parting of families taking place in the thrilling night air."
• p.4..."I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was.  Perhaps a sense of self is not even there in his nervous stillness in the narrow bunk, in this green grasshopper or little cricket, as if he has been smuggled away accidentally, with no knowledge of the act, into the future."
• p.10..."So by the end of our first day, we discovered we could become curious together."
• p.21..."Silent as corpses we looked at the stars.  We felt we were swimming in the sea, rather than a walled-in pool in the middle of the ocean."
• p.25..."Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet."
• p.29..."Who realizes how contented feral children are?"
• p.32..."It was easy to fool the three of us, who were naked with innocence."
• p.33..."There was something extraterrestrial and indelible about the verse Mazappa sang on that afternoon, whatever the words meant."
• p.37..."Thinking backwards I could remember the comfort of being curious and alone."
• p.55..."We released all the breath from our bodies and sank to the bottom and stood there waving our arms softly like Mr Daniels's palm trees, wishing he could see us."
• p.64...But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live.  And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by."
• p.81..."What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power."
• p.85...Michael describes the three of them as "freed mercury"
• p.135..."Who hath desired the sea?  Her excellent loneliness rather / Than the forecourts of kings."...Rudyard Kipling...Mr. Fonseca recited it at the sea funeral for de Silva
• p.138..."We had crossed open seas at twenty-two knots, and now we moved as if hobbled, at the speed of a slow bicycle, as if within the gradual unrolling of a scroll."
• p.139..."So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement."...during Suez Canal passage
• p.157..."We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to loosen and untie."
• p.158..."My shipboard nickname was 'Mynah'.  Almost my name but with a step into the air and a glimpse of some extra thing, like the slight swivel in their walk all birds have when they travel by land.  Also, it is an unofficial bird, and unreliable, its voice not fully trustworthy in spite of the range.."
• Notes:
• Title:  "the least privileged place"
• Trying to smoke the entire cane chair before the end of the cruise had ended
• p.60..Narayan made Michael listen to the insects in Bullock shit
• description of going through the Suez canal was wonderful
• Cassius' paintings of Suez experience....dare I say, rite of passage?
• Review:  This is a story full of a kaleidoscope of characters, full of the antics of three boys on an ocean liner from Ceylon to England, and an amazing array of events, and that is only one part of the novel.  Unfortunately, the other portion did not work well for me, and that was the portion about adulthood.  Although the parts written about the events on board the ship were wonderful, it did not blend well with the other portion.  Ondaatje's prose was at times the lyrical, magical prose which I love, and fell flat at other times.  Now, in the interest of full disclosure, my real life book club discussion did raise my awareness that it may be that the contrast was deliberate, but I am not sure.  It was a very good read, just not my favorite Ondaatje.