Thursday, February 20, 2014

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje


 
Sailing, oh sailing,

           a sea without women, oh

                      we men crave the sea.

 

This book was spell-bindingly written.  I finished it in two back to back readings.  It did drag a bit towards the end.  But this author is a master at 2 to 3 page character outlines.  He was like a script-writer penning a memorable back-story for an actor to use to properly get into character.

He neatly, Dickens-like, drew the characters together with a plot web at the end with some surprising twists.

The author titled this book a novel; but he also commented at the back that it could be called a fictional memoir.  As a novel, I found it bland, and when he went into older, reflective sections at the end, it was actually boring.  However, as fictional memoir, it was brilliant.  Ondaatje has an imaginative knack for inventing characters.

But then, I listened to Michael Krasny interview the “Train” guy about his book on Trains[1] (see below).  Ship travel, like train travel, pushes people’s nostalgia button.

So, I’m finishing up with my nostalgia.

Since stories have been told around traveler’s campfires, the most exciting and heroic are those about sea voyages.  It’s not too big a jump, for me, to think of space travel as sea voyages.  I’m not alone, the USS Enterprise of Captain Kirk and Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon to name a few.  I’m a junkie for sea stories; good or bad, I’ll still read them all.  My top four are: (1) The Odyssey, (2) Two Years Before the Mast, (3) The Old man and the Sea, and (4) Shackleton and the Endurance.  I’ve reread each of these at least once; a rarity reserved by Peter for the likes of Lawrence Durrell and the Alexandria Quartet, or Frederik Pohl’s “The Heechee Saga”.

My first Atlantic crossing by sea was on a troop ship, whose name was probably 0026894023.  It was a great adventure.  I got my “sea legs” after less than a day.  Me, who got seasick as a Boy Scout fishing off Santa Cruz Bay. [It was probably the early morning bus ride from San Jose to Santa Cruz; and I wasn’t the first – the deck was slippery from the first 6 or 7 eleven-year-old boys.] 

The crossing to Europe was in bad weather, rainstorms all the time; 30-45 foot swells that made you wonder why the ocean didn’t just swallow us up; “How will we ever get back on top of the swells?”  Looking forward along the port bow at a three-story building of turbulent water that you are heading for is scary. 

I volunteered to work in the bakery, getting special privileges, but mainly roamed the ship from sunup to sundown, just like these Sri-Lankan kids.  No swimming pools on a troop ship.  Most GIs stayed below decks and spent their time being sick, not eating and vomiting when they did.  The sea air gave me an enormous appetite, and I could eat even as food was sliding from one end of the table to the other.  We were prohibited from going on deck during bad weather, but the crew wasn’t about to patrol the place: “If some idiot GI wants to get washed overboard, who cares.” 

So, I spent most of my free time exploring the ship and watching the sea.

I could watch the sea for hours.



[1] Recently on NPR’s Forum:
On Feb 18th  Michael Krasny’s Forum was a call-in book discussion about “Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World”, written by Tom Zoellner.  In NPR’s promo for this program, they said that “… .. Tom Zoellner is back from a rousing trip around the world… .. Zoellner charts the history of the locomotive along the world's most important railways, from the birthplace of the steam engine in Cornwall, England, to the frigid stretches of the Trans-Siberian railroad. We'll talk about his journey and discuss the future of high speed rail.”
Most of the program was devoted to telephone callers, remembering with fond nostalgia, their experiences with trains.  They didn’t ever get to any of the planned talking points.  The link above will take you to the more than a dozen comments that came in on-line with similar nostalgia.
 

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