Here’s a bit from my review of The Cat’s Table for the Dallas Morning News:

The Cat’s Table

by Michael Ondaatje

(Knopf, $26)

            “You must never feel unimportant in the scheme of things,” a passenger on the Oronsay, a ship sailing from Sri Lanka to England in 1954, tells Michael, the 11-year-old narrator of Michael Ondaatje’s novel The Cat’s Table. Although Michael is seated for meals at the “cat’s table… the least privileged place” on the Oronsay, he proves to be integral to the scheme of things on this voyage.

On the three-week journey, Michael and the young friends he meets , on the ship, Cassius and Ramadhin, engage in endless mischief, some of which happens to alters the course of other characters’ lives.

            The narrator shares a given name with the author, and some of their biographical details match, but Ondaatje writes in an author’s note that the book is fictional, “from the captain and crew and all its passengers down to the narrator.” Ondaatje, like the narrator, was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) and immigrated to England before becoming an acclaimed Canadian writer. The narrator, nicknamed Mynah by his friends, plans to join his mother in England.

Click through to read the rest:

bit.ly/mZXzzD