In The Cat’s Table, we are both certain and uncertain of our narrator’s identity: that’s to say, Ondaatje toys with the degree to which the narrator resembles the author himself. His name is Michael; now in his late sixties, he is a writer; he speaks to us on occasion, as in the quotation above, as if he were at the podium at Toronto’s Harbourfront Festival. He relates the story of his three-week crossing by ship from Ceylon to England, in 1954, at the age of eleven—which is, indeed, the year in which Ondaatje traveled to Great Britain, and the age he was when he did so. How much the young Ondaatje resembled, in reality, the heedless and exuberant wrongdoer he describes—who with his two friends Ramadhin and Cassius “established one rule. Each day we had to do at least one thing that was forbidden”—is ultimately an irrelevance; just as it is irrelevant, really, whether the ship Oronsay of Ondaatje’s childhood actually carried a rabid millionaire cursed by a monk, a troupe of acrobats, a ladylike spy, or a prisoner in chains. The reality that Ondaatje creates on the page has the force of life itself, and that is all that matters.It's beautifully written yet in many ways more accessible than some of Ondaatje's previous work (and I say this as an Ondaatje fan). It has a good balance between gorgeous prose, compelling characters, and well-paced story. Definitely a highlight of my 2012 reading list.
Tomasi was the last in a line of minor princes in Sicily, and he had long contemplated writing a historical novel based on his great-grandfather, Don Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi, another Prince of Lampedusa. After the Lampedusa palace was bombed and pillaged by Allied forces in World War II, Tomasi sank into a lengthy depression, and began to write Il Gattopardo as a way to combat it.Which makes him a displaced aristocrat very like Nabokov (or De Sade, for that matter), but whereas resentment and vicious spite are never far below the surface in Nabokov, The Leopard is the purest distillation of elegiac and deeply loving melancholy I expect to ever have the opportunity to experience.
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posted by rabbitrabbit at 11:38 AM on December 12, 2012 [3 favorites]