<p>
I agree, I was glad I have actually been on several cruises (albeit shorter!) because it helped in relating to the setting. </p>
<p>Rather interestingly, I started reading Cat’s Table in the middle of reading Zadie Smith’s White Noise, another book about people from India (Bangladesh actually) living in London. Also quite the read.</p>
<p>^Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth”? ;)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yes, that was an interesting chapter, as it didn’t just take us away from the first person narrative, but off the ship altogether. </p>
<p>Asuntha’s story parallels Michael’s: It is another journey of a child traveling to reach an adult family member and be “claimed.” Michael travels from an aunt to a parent; Asuntha from a parent to an aunt. And both children find “family” among strangers. For Michael, Cassius and Ramadhin become his “clandestine family” (p. 155); for Asuntha, it is the acrobats, “the six other performers who had become her family” (p. 184). And both Michael and Asuntha “die” in the water. For Michael, it is the incident at age 9, when he is swept away by racing water toward the culvert:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Michael is saved by an anonymous outstretched hand. And Asuntha? We never know for sure, but on re-reading her history–i.e., the third person chapter with an omniscient perspective–I found a sentence that pretty much seals her fate: “The girl feared all bodies of water; in them you could see the darkness below the surface where it attempted to reach light” (p. 178).</p>
<p>Remember, Michael imagines that Asuntha’s fear of water–so apparent on the ship-- was faked: “She has posed for weeks in the profile of a person terrified of water” (p. 259). He envisions her as a strong swimmer, who “lights out for whatever land will hide her until she is found” (p. 260).</p>
<p>But the third person account of Asuntha is likely the “true” one; Michael’s unlikely, imaginative scenario follows directly upon his conversation with Emily:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Emily is grasping at straws and so is Michael. And so is the reader, too. I really wanted to believe that Asuntha swam “to one of those ancient cities…to make a new life” (p. 260).</p>
<p>Peachblossom- I agree that the Niemeyer/ daughter event was quite disturbing. Certainly, all those conspiring (including the father, who knew about the key in her mouth) expected them to survive. </p>
<p>After Michael visits Emily, taking the ferry, " Imagining Emily winding her way back to her new home, so far from the place she was bon into…She had journeyed after all these eyars to another island. But, an island can imprison you as well as protect you."</p>
<p>And then, from this ** angle** and cold perspective, I imagined the two of them Niemeyer and his daughter in the dark water…Magwitch and daughter…"</p>
<p>“they told her not to wait for him. …for now she what she swims towards is just somewhere-…”
Niemeyer surfaces again for another breath, … he hears the direction she is swimming in." …</p>
<p>I believe she makes it, not so sure about Niemeyer. </p>
<p>Mary13, thanks for the Magwitch explanation. I haven’t read Great Expectations for decades. Seems like the main characters have similarities to Ondaajte’s
Pip= Michael
Estella=Emily
Miss Havisham = Miss Lasqueti
Magwitch=Niemeyer (escaped prisoner)
Don’t want to derail this excellent discussion, just wanted to thank you Mary13, for enlightening me about Magwitch. </p>
<p>[SparkNotes:</a> Great Expectations: Character List](<a href=“http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/greatex/characters.html]SparkNotes:”>Great Expectations: Character List | SparkNotes)</p>
<p>And, Mythmom you led me to this. Just yesterday I heard that someone is taking a course called “Your Brain on Fiction”, and now today, I understand that title. (didn’t yesterday)</p>
<p><a href=“Opinion | The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction - The New York Times”>Opinion | The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction - The New York Times;
<p>Cross posted with Mary13.
Mary that entire section, made me think of all the immigrants, leaving their homelands for a new life.</p>
<p>Great links SJCM and NJTM! This quote from The Observer article caught my eye -</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Hmmm…I’m not sure that Ondaatje’s “below the waterline thoughts” are from his unconscious imagination. but we do get a glimpse of Michael’s below the waterline thoughts on page 97 when Michael and Cassius go outside on the deck after experiencing the storm tethered to the deck.
Once again “the underneath” has power.</p>
<p>I felt the “displacement” of Michael and the other characters throughout the book. On page 137, after Rahmadhin’s death, Michael recalls his relationship with Rhamadhin and Massi and describes their youthful time as “when the three of us lounged in a city that was not quite ours and where we were made to feel it was not quite ours”.</p>
<p>On page 250 Emily tells Michael that her father died. Their conversations follows
</p>
<p>Mary, I was about to post and saw your post about Asuntha and Michael’s experiences in water. The quotes "I was nine years old and there would now be a sightless journey into an underground darkness.” and "The girl feared all bodies of water; in them you could see the darkness below the surface where it attempted to reach light, both go below the waterline. It seems there are many quotes in this story that take us underneath, below the surface.</p>
<p>ETA - Just read your post above. I guess we were all writing at the same time.</p>
<p>Bu/Bc- to continue your theme-page 243
" But whatever Emily’s role had been in that event, it was to exist unspoken, through most of our lives. Did I witness something else below the surface of what had happened that night ? Was it part of a boy’s fervent imagination? "</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yes, it looks like it better than if we were together in person, where wed probably all be talking at the same time! </p>
<p>BUandBC82, great find re the second quote on The Underneath. Perfect.</p>
<p>SJChessMom, I loved the NYT article. Especially this:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So thats why even though Im not much of a traveler, I feel like Ive been everywhere. I knew all this time with you guys would turn out to be fruitful. :)</p>
<p>Ohh…of course Asuntha’s journey parallels Michael’s! How could I have missed that?</p>
<p>Like SJCM, I believe that Asuntha survives. The other alternative is just too sad. I don’t think Niemeyer makes it, though.</p>
<p>You know, it’s funny but I know an Asuntha…except her name is spelled “Assunta.” She is a certified Montessori teacher at a school my boys attended, and she was originally from Sri Lanka.</p>
<p>
Yes, of course. Sorry. I’ve read them both so all that whiteness is getting mixed up :).</p>
<p>Mary, thanks for the computer tips. I’ll practice tomorrow. Do you remember in Out of Africa when Karen Blixen calls herself “a mental traveler” when she spins her tales to Denys Finch-Hatten? </p>
<p>The book this most reminds me of is Huck Finn. In that book unsupervised children are also involved with ideas of murder and issues too big for them to grasp. Like the three on the boat they voyage outside of civilization.</p>
<p>For me the circus section in the third person is not affective. There are also a section narrated in the present tense that challenges the narrative. Unfortunately Kindle editions make it more difficult to note passages.</p>
<p>I think it possible that the prisoner and his daughter do survive the water, at least her. The is a lengthy description of her swimming to landfall while he still fumbles with the lock. It may be utterly unlikely, but likes Shakespea</p>
<p>re’s Viola who escapes a shipwreck, she may just survive. She is an acrobat, although a failed one who had once lost her nerve. She clearly got it back again. There is no way to learn her fate.</p>
<p>I understand the book as a novel of displacement and disspora, but for me it is much more about childhood and what adulthood provides and what it robs us of.</p>
<p>It’s easy to think that murder has robbed this children of innocence, but really all the characters in the book are ruined by encountering the violence and isolation of life, and some of them are before the book opens, like Miss Lasquieta.</p>
<p>Emily’s wildness has threatened to destroy her before she steps on board.</p>
<p>The children are not yet destroyed, but Cassius arrives with the sheer anti-social cheekiness he will continue to take with him, Rahmadihn with the heart ailment that fells him, and Michael with a kind of remoteness that protects and destroys him.</p>
<p>They all grasp at things to save them, like a trapeze artist reaches for the bar, but eventually they fall. In this novel visual art plays a prominent part. We have drawings, Cassius’ paintings, the tapestry and others mentioned throughout as a possible lifeboat, like the ones the boy sleep in, but nothing works.</p>
<p>All disperse. All ties become tenuous (as Michael and Massi’s marriage dissolves.) we have no deus-ex-machina (thank goodness) with Michael and Emily flinging themselves into each other’s arms. Each is left with his/her scares, memories, guilts and dashed hopes intact.</p>
<p>The voyage is one into the desperation of the human spirit. Although the three weeks intensify the process (speeded up photography if you will) I am left to think the trajectory would have been the same (even though Ondaatje might not agree.)</p>
<p>Most interesting to me is that the narrative is totally different after we make our foray into life in England. When we go back to ship we bring a bit more adult consciousness with us, which is impossible in a realistic understanding of the narrative, but effective in the book. Although Cassius always paints from the vantage point of an eleven year old, the reader is no longer confined to that perspective.</p>
<p>Even more interesting to me is to think this children are this unprotected only because parents aren’t around or don’t care. All childhood’s are fraught with terror. When I think of things I did at three, at eight, at ten…We’d like to believe our children were never ths unprotected, but they were. Maybe not for three weeks, but probably for three houses, and in those periods they lived their own terrors.</p>
<p>Maurice Sendak’s books are about this. He said children are always trying to protect their parents from the monsters under the bed. How true.</p>
<p>Who are the children Michael is telling his tale to? We never know.</p>
<p>And what are their terrors that they hide from their father?</p>
<p>mythmom, thanks for that nice reflection. You wrote:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Up to a point, Michael Ondaatje shares that view. This is from the interview:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>But there is also the flip side. This “neglect” may have brought terrors, but also a joyous freedom. The “great freedom of youth” says Ondaatje in the interview – and in the novel he writes, “Who realizes how contented feral children are?” (p. 27)</p>
<p>I put neglect in quotes because I don’t think the parents in The Cat’s Table were necessarily remiss. It was a different world then, and with immigrant families in particular, there must have been many instances of long-term separation. Certainly, Michael’s mother greeted him warmly, and of course, Ramadhin’s parents were attentive and loving.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Sir Hector’s death contains the fear-of-water motif that runs through Asuntha’s story. Ondaatje could have picked any number of fatal diseases for Sir Hector to be saddled with, but he chose hydrophobia (rabies). There is some irony there…the character with hydrophobia dies on a ship on the ocean and is buried at sea. </p>
<p>Another oddity of Sir Hector’s story is that he is twice killed by a dog: the first one that bit him and gave him rabies, and the second one that sunk its teeth into his throat and finished him off. Why do you think that is? Is Ondaatje saying that it is impossible to escape the fate that the gods assign you? After all, that is what Sir Hector was trying to do: escape his fate—death by a dog—but it found him anyway. </p>
<p>I think such fatalism can be found in Emily’s story as well. I doubt that an earlier delivery of Miss Lasqueti’s letter would have stopped her from making the choices that she did. (As mythmom said above, “Although the three weeks intensify the process [speeded up photography if you will] I am left to think the trajectory would have been the same.”)</p>
<p>And years afterward, even while haunted by those choices, Emily also seems to embrace them. Her fate is what it is-- “I don’t think you can love me into safety,” she tells Michael.</p>
<p>I think Sir Hector’s twice killing by the dog is to heighten the magical realism of the tale. Again, it is almost beyond the reader’s belief, and we don’t want to consent to this version of the facts. However, the final catastrophes are entirely believable, so we eventually assent to it all.</p>
<p>And yes, this horror, of two fatal dog bites, both heightens and lessens the fates of our boys. We may want to say that if they’d never been on this boat they would have been saved, their psychologies would have been sounder. And yet, Sir Hector’s fate argues differently. </p>
<p>It also makes them responsible for a death so they are not only victims of circumstances but somehow collude with all the other players in bringing about exactly what occurs, in all its randomness and grotesqueness. </p>
<p>We like to think of children as immune from the disillusionment and violence they witness, and more especially, from the chaos and violence they instigate.</p>
<p>So many of my friends talk about chance and horrible encounters from childhood, and I had my own harrowing stories. And yet it is also a feature of childhood to keep secret, for fear of punishment, of being blamed, of losing freedom. The boys certainly exemplify this.</p>
<p>And yet we also have glimpses of their agency and competence, like the amazing artistry of Rahmadihn’s knots that lash them (like Odysseus) to the lifeboats and save their lives, if we can believe Michael.</p>
<p>Wordsworth’s quote: “The child is father to the man” is very true here.</p>
<p>This is such an interesting book discussion! Thanks !</p>
<p>Mythmom, I agree with your statement that so much of the book is utterly believable that “eventually we assent to it all.”</p>
<p>In a way, the book is like a dream in which the monsters of our subconscious loom large, in symbolic form. One of my favorite images of the book describes how the passengers on the Oronsay “staggered around in giant animal heads” at dances (p. 13). </p>
<p>I would say that our dreams are as “true” as our waking lives; they are just a different form of reality. </p>
<p>While there is a fear of water motif in the book, there is also a love of water motif! Michael loved water, which was why he used to jump into the raging monsoon channel at his school. He also loved diving for the spoons in the Oronsay swimming pool…so much so that he thought at the time that the best job in the world would be that of a professional spoon diver!</p>
<p>In another of my favorite passage in the book (p 33), Michael would sometimes stand alone on C Deck at dusk staring at the ocean that “at times appeared to rise almost to my level, as if wanting to pluck me away…No matter how scared I was, I remained there, adjacent to the passing darkness, half wanting to pull myself back, half desiring to leap towards it.”</p>
<p>Michael was BRAVE. So were most of the other characters. And, while the issue of fatalism is an interesting one that I’m not sure about, I don’t agree that “all the characters in the book are ruined by encountering the violence and isolation of life.” Just about everyone is damaged, certainly, but sometimes they save one another. One example is how Miss Lasqueti knew the Baron was stealing, but did not turn him in.</p>
<p>And what about Ondaatje’s loving portrait of Mr Fonseka? What a poignant character! He was a very inward man, who lived in a world of books, but he still was able to connect with others. Fonseka is one I would in no way characterize as ruined or destroyed.</p>
<p>The book thanks Mr. For d</p>
<p>^ Maybe…Michael Ondaatje says in the Steve Roberts interview, “There’s a great remark by Kinky Friedman, which I love to quote, which is, ‘there’s a very fine line between fiction and nonfiction, and I think I snorted it in 1976.’” 
</p>
<p>On the other hand, Ondaatje also says in the interview, “those boys and all the characters on the ship were fictional characters that I invented and then I created a kind of adventure story for them.” I suspect that although technically fictional, some of the characters are probably a composite of people he’s met in real life.</p>
<p>NJTheatreMOM, thanks for pointing out the love-of-water motif. Michael is a fish, isn’t he? He is so comfortable in water; for him (unlike Asuntha), it is live-giving. Whether it’s the pool or the sea or the rain from the storm (which was as much thrilling as terrifying), Michael lives in a world of water. This even comes through when he is indoors, in his small quarters on the ship. He describes his roommate and companions:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Another peripheral character who thrives in water is the roller-skating girl. After skating, “she’d unlace her skates and walk exhausted, sweating and fully clothed, towards the outdoor shower. She would stand in the gush and spray of it, tossing her hair this way, that way, like some clothed animal. This was a new kind of beauty.” And when she’s not skating, she’s swimming:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Do you think there is any significance to the roller-skating girl? In some ways, it seems as if her character sends a message of futility: She skates around and around, she swims back and forth, but she never gets anywhere. And yet, as Michael points out, her determination, her energy and her discipline are beautiful.</p>
<p>^Glad you brought up the “Australian”, I wondered about her.
Does she reappear later anywhere in the book? </p>
<p>“We had never witnessed such determination…none of the females in our families behaved this way”
Was she representing the “exotic” to the boys, after all Australia is on the other side of the world? Was it Ondaajte’s, a Canadian, nod to those plucky Australians, we Americans don’t often think about ?</p>
<p>I think the “none of the females in our families behaved that way” comment is key. </p>
<p>The boys’ almost-arousal by watching the skater sort of prefigures Michael’s completely new experience of arousal by Emily in her cabin. It’s not so much that the skater is exotic (Australia is not too terribly far from Ceylon, where they were from)…she’s erotic. :)</p>
<p>That girl is only in the first half of the book, I’m pretty certain.</p>