Discussion questions for The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje

1. Did you ever get a sense that you knew any of the characters?  Were they distinguishable from one another?
2. If you had a favorite among the numerous secondary characters, who was it?  Why?
3. When Emily says to the narrator, “I don’t think you can love me into safety,” (page 250), to what is she referring? What is the danger, decades after the voyage?
4. The New York Times‘s reviewer likens reading this book to being led into a dark cave, and being completely dependent on the light from the leader. “Reading Michael Ondaatje’s mesmerizing new novel, The Cat’s Table, is like being guided, just as surely and just as magically, through the author’s lustrous visions.”  How did you feel about the writing?
5. In a note at the end of the book Ondaatje takes pains to establish that The Cat’s Table is “fictional,” though it “sometimes uses the coloring and locations of memoir and autobiography. This disclaimer will not keep the reader from reflecting that any life so richly recounted belongs more to fiction than fact.”  Why do you think he felt the need to say this?

For more questions, check out the publisher’s resources.

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