The Cat’s Table

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table

 The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje is a luminous novel about memory, chance, and the strange alchemy of growing up. The story is set aboard a ship sailing from Colombo to England in the early 1950s. It follows a 11 year-old boy, Michael, who is seated at the ‘cat’s table,’ the least prestigious place in the dining room, far from the authority of adults. From this marginal position, the novel unfolds the ability to see the world obliquely, through curiosity rather than control.

Ondaatje writes with a restraint that is deceptive. The plot is episodic, almost drifting, mirroring the ocean that carries its characters. Michael and his companions—Cassius and Ramadhin move through a floating society of eccentrics, which includes a jazz pianist in disgrace, a mysterious prisoner, a silent tailor, and adults whose private griefs remain partially hidden. These encounters linger like half-remembered stories, suggesting that childhood understanding is always incomplete.

What elevates The Cat’s Table beyond a simple coming-of-age tale is its adult consciousness looking back. The older narrator reflects on how friendships, betrayals, and moments of wonder gained meaning only years later. Memory, is less an archive than a reconstruction shaped by emotion and loss.

The sea voyage becomes a metaphor for life in transition between cultures, innocence and knowledge, belonging and exile. There is no dramatic climax, no grand revelation. Instead, the novel leaves a gentle ache, the sense that some journeys matter not for where they end, but for the fleeting connections made along the way.

The Cat’s Table is a beautiful novel on how childhood experiences quietly, irrevocably shape the adults we become. This bittersweet story of memory & place, of three boys who take a journey by sea from one world to another, which flourishes in the gaps between fact and fiction is my “Read of the Week”