Book Review #51
M Train
by Patti Smith
If I could I would give this book three and a half stars. I liked it, though nowhere as much as her brilliant, award winning memoir "Just Kids." "M Train" is lovely and elegiac and at times achingly sad as she recalls those she has loved and lost, especially her mother and father, her brother Todd and husband Fred Sonic Smith. And others, too: William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet and Paul Bowles. "M" is for "memory," as her thoughts and recollections spin forth in a nonlinear, stream of consciousness flow of images, melding the past with the present. However, there is also much repetition: lots of black coffee and tending to her three cats and traveling to foreign places and sitting in cafes and trying to write something, anything in the face of writer's block. At times my mind wandered. Not out of boredom. But because something I read would trigger my own personal memory. And for awhile I'd find myself riding my own M Train. In the end though I'm glad I read Patti Smith's book and took the journey along with her.
by Patti Smith
If I could I would give this book three and a half stars. I liked it, though nowhere as much as her brilliant, award winning memoir "Just Kids." "M Train" is lovely and elegiac and at times achingly sad as she recalls those she has loved and lost, especially her mother and father, her brother Todd and husband Fred Sonic Smith. And others, too: William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet and Paul Bowles. "M" is for "memory," as her thoughts and recollections spin forth in a nonlinear, stream of consciousness flow of images, melding the past with the present. However, there is also much repetition: lots of black coffee and tending to her three cats and traveling to foreign places and sitting in cafes and trying to write something, anything in the face of writer's block. At times my mind wandered. Not out of boredom. But because something I read would trigger my own personal memory. And for awhile I'd find myself riding my own M Train. In the end though I'm glad I read Patti Smith's book and took the journey along with her.
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