Michael Ondaatje with Carolyn Forché

When:
Time:

Wednesday 15 February 2012
7:00 pm

Where:

Lensic Performing Arts Center

211 West San Francisco Street
Santa Fe, NM 87501
Google Map Link

Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje, poet, novelist, and noted editor and filmmaker, was born in Sri Lanka in 1943, spent his teenage ye… Read full bio.

Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit in 1950 and is the author of four books of poetry, the first of which, Gath… Read full bio.

About this Event

Here is an excerpt reprinted from the book jacket of The Cat’s Table:

In the early 1950’s, an eleven-year-old boy boards a huge liner bound for England — a ‘castle that was to cross the sea’. At mealtimes, he is placed at the lowly ‘Cat’s Table’ with an eccentric group of grown-ups and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys become involved in the worlds and stories of the adults around them, tumbling from one adventure and delicious discovery to another, ‘bursting all over the place like freed mercury’. And at night, the boys spy on a shackled prisoner — his crime and fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them for ever. The Cat’s Table is a vivid, poignant and thrilling book, full of Ondaatje’s trademark set-pieces and breathtaking images: a story told with a child’s sense of wonder by a novelist at the very height of his powers.