magicalwoodlands 's review for:

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje

3.0

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Ondaatje at his best is exquisite. That set the bar really high for this. I'm not even rating this on the same scale as I rate the genre fiction that I read. I'm giving it three stars because in some ways it did not deliver on the promise of the first half of the book. The second half just felt uncomfortable and a little too spacious to me, some threads just hanging for two loosely. Perhaps ultimately the adult vantage point of the narrator is simply not as delicious as the remembered journey of his childhood. And that's fair. Mostly our lives now are not as strangely magical as the lives left behind us in our youth when everything was new. But the expression of present time simply did not measure up to the section set in the past - which is gorgeously rendered. Was that purposeful? Perhaps. Nonetheless, I left feeling empty and missing the ship time. I think that's enough said.