M train

Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Smith maps her creative life in this sequence of atmospheric, tender, and lithe essays ondreams, solitude, travel, and love. Smith's passion for the elixir of black coffee savored in quiet cafés, her sanctuaries and studios, forms a unifying refrain within these exquisite, transporting, and reflective autobiographical tales. A poet, performer, artist, vagabond, and National Book Award-winning memoirist for Just Kids (2010), Smith came to art through a working-class portal and gratefully pays homage to the visionaries who have long guided and inspired her. She chronicles audacious pilgrimages to Frida Kahlo's home; the former site of a penal colony in French Guiana, in honor of Genet; Tangiers, where she meets Paul Bowles; various writers' graves in Japan; and Berlin for a meeting of the esoteric Continental Drift Club, founded to honor the explorer Alfred Wegener. Deepening her mission of remembrance, Smith writes lovingly of her factory-worker father and his inner elegance, and her husband, Fred Sonic Smith, with whom she shared mystical times. She muses over her passion for reading, addiction to detective shows, and bouts with melancholia, and tells the fable-like story of the old, decrepit bungalow she bought on Queens' Far Rockaway beachfront right before the onslaught of Hurricane Sandy. Smith is astutely romantic, gracefully imaginative, gently spiritual, and touchingly humble in this beautiful and entrancing chronicle of dancing to the music of change and finding words that balance loss. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With the concurrent release of her Collected Lyrics, 1970-2015 (see p.29), Smith will be the focus of major and diverse media coverage as she conducts an extensive national tour.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Following Smith's bestselling and critically acclaimed book Just Kids, this essay collection creates a map of the singer-songwriter's peripatetic journeys to cafes, cemeteries, hotels, and train stations around the world. She is the perfect guide, revealing the mysteries in the shadows, the little bits of life people often take for granted-such as a good cup of coffee, a familiar coat, or the "transformation of the heart." In 19 imagistic reflections, Smith invites readers to travel with her from Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul and Sylvia Plath's grave to the Far Rockaway bungalow that Smith buys just before Hurricane Sandy comes ashore and destroys much of the surrounding territory. Smith's haunting and joyful recollections of her life with her late husband, Fred Sonic Smith, anchor her intensely physical descent into memory and its ability to haunt her waking and dreaming life. Smith illustrates her meditations with her signature Polaroid photos of Fred, as well as objects such as her father's desk chair and the chess table where Bobby Fischer played Boris Spassky. The narrative carries readers through the despair, loss, hope, consolation, and mysteries that Smith faces as she lives through Fred's death, struggles with the writer's craft, and comes to realize, through one of her dreams, that the "writer is a conductor"-and she is indeed a phenomenal conductor along these elegant tours of the haunting places in her life, where anyone might stumble upon momentary but life-altering wisdom. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

This quiet memoir may surprise fans of Smith's music, as it makes no reference to her career as a rock icon or even that she's a musician. The book is more a travel diary than anything else, meditating on Smith's journeys to Mexico, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere, always returning to her homes (old and new) in New York, but never for long. Smith visits favorite authors (living and dead), memories of her late husband, a slightly mysterious explorer's society, and always has her eye on the next perfect cup of coffee and her obsession with detective shows. VERDICT Recommended for listeners seeking an eccentric wander around the world or meditations on art and mortality; for fans of Smith who would enjoy seeing an unexpected side of the music legend. ["In many ways, this book defies categorization, and that is one of its many charms": LJ 9/1/5 review of the Knopf hc.]-Jason Puckett, Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Iconic poet, writer, and artist Smith (Just Kids, 2010, etc.) articulates the pensive rhythm of her life through the stations of her travels. Spending much of her time crouched in a corner table of a Greenwich Village cafe sipping coffee, jotting quixotic notes in journals, and "plotting my next move," the author reflects on the places she's visited, the personal intercourse, and the impact each played on her past and present selves. She describes a time in 1978 when she planned to open her own cafe, but her plans changed following a chance meeting with MC5 guitarist Fred Sonic Smith, who swiftly stole and sealed her heart with marriage and children. A graceful, ruminative tour guide, Smith writes of traveling together with Fred armed with a vintage 1967 Polaroid to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni in northwest French Guiana, then of solitary journeys to Frida Kahlo's Mexican Casa Azul and to the graves of Sylvia Plath, Jean Genet, and a swath of legendary Japanese filmmakers. After being seduced by Rockaway Beach in Queens and indulgently purchasing a ramshackle bungalow there, the property was destroyed by Hurricane Sandythough she vowed to rebuild. In a hazy, often melancholy narrative, the author synchronizes past memories and contemporary musings on books, art, and Michigan life with Fred. Preferring to write productively from the comfort of her bed, Smith vividly describes herself as "an optimistic zombie propped up by pillows, producing pages of somnambulistic fruit." She spent seasons of lethargy binge-watching crime TV, arguing with her remote control, venturing out to a spontaneous and awkward meeting with chess great Bobby Fischer, and trekking off to interview Paul Bowles in Tangiers. No matter the distance life may take her, Smith always recovers some semblance of normalcy with the simplistic pleasures of a deli coffee on her Gotham stoop, her mind constantly buoyed by humanity, art, and memory. Not as focused as Just Kids, but an atmospheric, moody, and bittersweet memoir to be savored and pondered. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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In 1965 I had come to New York City from South Jersey just to roam around, and nothing seemed more romantic than to write poetry in a Greenwich Village café. I finally got the courage to enter Caffè Dante on MacDougal Street. The walls were covered with printed murals of the city of Florence and scenes from  The Divine Comedy .   A few years later I would sit by a low window that looked out into a small alley, reading Mrabet's  The Beach Café . A young fish-seller named Driss meets a reclusive, uncongenial codger who has a café with only one table and one chair on a rocky stretch of shore near Tangier. The slow-moving atmosphere surrounding the café captivated me. Like Driss, I dreamed of opening a place of my own: the Café Nerval, a small haven where poets and travelers might find the simplicity of asylum.   I imagined threadbare Persian rugs on wide-planked floors, two long wood tables with benches, a few smaller tables, and an oven for baking bread. No music no menus. Just silence black coffee olive oil fresh mint brown bread. Photographs adorning the walls: a melancholic portrait of the café's namesake, and a smaller image of the forlorn poet Paul Verlaine in his overcoat, slumped before a glass of absinthe.   In 1978 I came into a little money and was able to pay a security deposit toward the lease of a one-story building on East Tenth Street. It had once been a beauty parlor but stood empty save for three white ceiling fans and a few folding chairs. My brother, Todd, and I whitewashed the walls and waxed the wood floors. Two wide skylights flooded the space with light. I spent several days sitting beneath them at a card table, drinking deli coffee and plotting my next move.   In the end I was obliged to abandon my café. Two years before, I had met the musician Fred Sonic Smith in Detroit. It was an unexpected encounter that slowly altered the course of my life. My yearning for him permeated everything--my poems, my songs, my heart. We endured a parallel existence, shuttling back and forth between New York and Detroit, brief rendezvous that always ended in wrenching separations. Just as I was mapping out where to install a sink and a coffee machine, Fred implored me to come and live with him in Detroit. I said goodbye to New York City and the aspirations it contained. I packed what was most precious and left all else behind. I didn't mind. The solitary hours I'd spent drinking coffee at the card table, awash in the radiance of my café dream, were enough for me.   Some months before our first wedding anniversary Fred told me that if I promised to give him a child he would first take me anywhere in the world. I chose Saint-Laurent du Maroni, a border town in northwest French Guiana. I had long wished to see the remains of the French penal colony where hard-core criminals were once shipped before being transferred to Devil's Island. In  The Thief's Journal Jean Genet had written of Saint-Laurent as hallowed ground and of its inmates with devotional empathy. He had ascended the ladder toward them: reform school, petty thief, and three-time loser; but as he was sentenced, the prison he'd held in such reverence was closed, the last living inmates returned to France. Genet served his time in Fresnes Prison. Devastated, he wrote:  I am shorn of my infamy .   At 70, Genet was reportedly in poor health and most likely would never go to Saint-Laurent himself. I envisioned bringing him its earth and stone. Though often amused by my quixotic notions, Fred did not make light of this self-imposed task. He agreed without argument. I wrote a letter to William Burroughs, whom I had known since my early 20s. William, close to Genet and possessing his own romantic sensibility, promised to assist me in delivering the stones.   Preparing for our trip, Fred and I spent our days in the Detroit Public Library studying the history of Suriname and French Guiana. Fred bought maps, khaki clothing, traveler's checks, and a compass; cut his long, lank hair; and bought a French dictionary. When he embraced an idea he looked at things from every angle. He did not read Genet, however. He left that up to me.   We flew on a Sunday to Miami and stayed for two nights in a roadside motel. We ate red beans and yellow rice in Little Havana and visited Crocodile World. The short stay readied us for the extreme heat we were about to face. In Grenada and Haiti, all passengers had to deplane while the hold was searched for smuggled goods. We finally landed in Suriname at dawn; a handful of young soldiers armed with automatic weapons waited as we were herded into a bus that transported us to a vetted hotel. The first anniversary of the 1980 military coup that overthrew the democratic government was looming: an anniversary just days before our own.   After a few days bending in the heat of the capital city of Paramaribo, a guide drove us 150 kilometers to the town of Albina on the west bank of the Maroni River bordering French Guiana. The pink sky was veined in lightning. Our guide found a young boy who agreed to take us across by pirogue, a long dugout canoe. We pushed off in a light rain that swiftly escalated into a torrential downpour. The boy handed me an umbrella and warned us not to trail our fingers in the water. I suddenly noticed the river teeming with tiny black fish. Piranha! He laughed as I quickly withdrew my hand.     In an hour or so the boy dropped us off at the foot of a muddy embankment. He dragged his pirogue onto land and joined some workers beneath a length of black oilcloth stretched over four wooden posts. They seemed amused by our momentary confusion and pointed us in the direction of the main road. As we struggled up a slippery knoll, the calypso beat of Mighty Swallow's "Soca Dance" wafted from a boom box. We tramped through the empty town, finally taking cover in a bar. Two men were drinking Calvados. Fred engaged in a broken French-English conversation with a leathery-skinned fellow who presided over the nearby turtle reserves. As the rains subsided, the owner of the local hotel appeared, offering his services. Then a younger, sulkier version emerged to take our bags, and we followed them along a muddied trail down a hill to our lodgings. We had not even booked a hotel and yet a room awaited us.   The Hôtel Galibi was spartan yet comfortable. A small bottle of watered-down cognac and two plastic cups were set on the dresser. Spent, we slept, even as the returning rain beat relentlessly upon the corrugated tin roof. The morning sun was strong. I left our clothes to dry on the patio and spread the contents of our pockets on a small table: damp receipts, dismembered fruits, Fred's ever-present guitar picks.   Around noon a cement worker drove us outside the ruins of the Saint-Laurent prison. There were a few stray chickens scratching in the dirt and an overturned bicycle, but no one seemed to be around. Our driver entered with us through a low stone archway and then just slipped away. The compound had the air of a tragically defunct boomtown. Fred and I moved about in alchemical silence, mindful not to disturb the reigning spirits.   In search of the right stones, I entered the solitary cells, examining the faded graffiti tattooing the walls. Hairy balls, cocks with wings, the prime organ of Genet's angels. Not here, I thought. I looked around for Fred. He had found a small graveyard. I saw him paused before a headstone that read, "Son your mother is praying for you." He stood there for a long time looking up at the sky. I left him alone and inspected the outbuildings, finally choosing the earthen floor of the mass cell to gather the stones. It was a dank place the size of a small airplane hangar. Heavy, rusted chains were anchored into the walls illuminated by slim shafts of light. Yet there was still some scent of life: manure, earth, and an array of scuttling beetles.   I dug a few inches seeking stones that might have been pressed by the hard-calloused feet of the inmates or the soles of heavy boots worn by the guards. I carefully chose three and put them in an oversize Gitanes matchbox, leaving the bits of earth clinging to them. Fred offered his handkerchief to wipe the dirt from my hands and then made a little sack for the matchbox. He placed it in my hands, the first step toward placing them in the hands of Genet.   We didn't stay long in Saint-Laurent. We went seaside but the turtle reserves were off-limits, as they were spawning. Fred spent a lot of time in the bar, talking to the fellows. The men seemed to respect him, regarding him without irony. He had that effect on other men. I was content just sitting on a crate outside the bar staring down an empty street I had never seen and might never see again.   For the most part I kept to myself. Occasionally I caught glimpses of the maid, a barefoot girl with long, dark hair. She smiled and gestured but spoke no English. She tidied our room and washed our clothes. In gratitude I gave her one of my bracelets, a gold chain with a four-leaf clover, which I saw dangling from her wrist as we departed.   There was no rail service in French Guiana. The fellow from the bar had found us a driver, who carried himself like an extra in  The Harder They Come  with a cocked cap, aviator sunglasses, and a leopard-print shirt. We arranged a price and he agreed to drive us the 268 kilometers to Cayenne. He insisted our bags stay with him in the front seat of his beat-up tan Peugeot as chickens were normally transported in the trunk. We drove along Route Nationale, listening to reggae on a station riddled with static.   Every once in a while I untied the handkerchief to look at the Gitanes matchbox with its silhouette of a Gypsy posturing with her tambourine in a swirl of indigo-tinged smoke. But I did not open it. I pictured a small yet triumphal moment passing the stones to Genet. Fred held my hand as we wound through dense forests and passed short, sturdy Amerindians balancing iguanas squarely on their heads. We traveled through a tiny commune that had just a few houses and one six-foot crucifix. We asked the driver to stop. He got out and examined his tires. Fred took a photograph of the sign that read "Tonate. Population 9," and I said a little prayer.   The primary mission accomplished, we had no ultimate destination; we were free. But as we approached Kourou we sensed a shift. We were entering a military zone and hit a checkpoint. The driver's identity card was inspected and after an interminable stretch of silence we were ordered to get out of the car. Two officers searched the front and back seats, finding a switchblade with a broken spring in the glove box. That can't be so bad, I thought, but as they knocked on the trunk our driver became markedly agitated. Dead chickens? Maybe drugs. They circled around the car, and then asked him for the keys. He threw them in a shallow ravine and bolted but was swiftly wrestled to the ground. I glanced sidelong at Fred. He betrayed no emotion and I followed his lead.   They opened the trunk. Inside was a man who looked to be in his early 30s curled up like a slug in a rusting conch shell. He seemed terrified as they poked him with a rifle and ordered him to get out. We were all herded to the police headquarters, put in separate rooms, and interrogated in French. The commander arrived, and we were brought before him. He was barrel-chested with dark, sad eyes and a thick mustache that dominated his careworn face. Fred quickly took stock of things. I slipped into the role of compliant female, for in this obscure annex of the Foreign Legion it was definitely a man's world. I watched silently as the human contraband, stripped and shackled, was led away. Fred was ordered into the commander's office. He turned and looked at me. stay calm was the message telegraphed from his pale blue eyes.   An officer brought in our bags, and another wearing white gloves went through everything. I sat holding the handkerchief, relieved I was not asked to surrender it. An interrogator brought me a black coffee on an oval tray with an inlay of a blue butterfly and entered the commander's office. I could see Fred's profile. After a time they all came out. They seemed in amiable spirits. The commander gave Fred a manly embrace and we were placed in a private car. Neither of us said a word as we pulled into the capital city of Cayenne. Fred had the address of a hotel given to him by the commander. We were dropped off at the foot of a hill. It's somewhere up there, the driver motioned, and we carried our bags up the stone steps.   --What did you two talk about? I asked.   --I really can't say for sure, he only spoke French.   --How did you communicate?   --Cognac.   Fred seemed deep in thought.   --I know that you are concerned about the fate of the driver, he said, but it's out of our hands. He placed us in real jeopardy and in the end my concern was for you.   --Oh, I wasn't afraid.   --Yes, he said, that's why I was concerned.   The hotel was to our liking. We drank French brandy from a paper sack and slept wrapped in layers of mosquito netting. In the morning we explored Cayenne. It was Carnival time, and the city was all but deserted. Overcrowded ferries departed for Devil's Island. Calypso music poured from a mammoth disco in the shape of an armadillo. There were a few small souvenir stands with identical fare: thin, red blankets made in China and metallic blue raincoats. But mostly there were lighters, all kinds of lighters, with images of parrots, spaceships, and men of the Foreign Legion. There was nothing much to keep one there, yet we stayed in Cayenne until our anniversary as if bewitched.   On our last Sunday, women in bright dresses and men in top hats were celebrating the end of Carnival. Following their makeshift parade on foot, we ended up at Rémire-Montjoly, a commune southeast of the city. The revelers dispersed. Fred and I stood mesmerized by the emptiness of the long, sweeping beaches. It was a perfect day for our anniversary and I couldn't help thinking it was the perfect spot for a beach café. Fred went on before me, whistling to a black dog somewhat up ahead. There was no sign of his master. Fred threw a stick into the water and the dog fetched it. I knelt down in the sand and sketched out plans for an imaginary café with my finger. Excerpted from M Train by Patti Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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