M Train

Zusatztext 73366251 Informationen zum Autor Patti Smith Klappentext National Best Seller From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids: an unforgettable odyssey of a legendary artist! told through the prism of the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. It is a book Patti Smith has described as "a roadmap to my life." M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee! ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was! and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality! past and present! and across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations! we travel to Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico; to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; and to the graves of Genet! Plath! Rimbaud! and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft and on artistic creation. Here! too! are singular memories of Smith's life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband! Fred Sonic Smith. Braiding despair with hope and consolation! illustrated with her signature Polaroids! M Train is a meditation on travel! detective shows! literature! and coffee. It is a powerful! deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today. 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 everythingmy 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 r...

ldquo;Incantatory . . . Unlike her first memoir, the now classic, Just Kids, which was all about the thrill of ‘becoming,’ M Train is mostly about the challenge of enduring erosion and discovering new passions (like detective fiction and a tumbledown cottage in Rockaway Beach, Queens). Smith, of course, is a ‘kid’ no longer. She’s suffered a lot of losses, including the deaths of artist Robert Mapplethorpe, who was her partner in crime in the Just Kids years, and her husband, musician Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, who died suddenly in his 40s. ‘They are all stories now,’ says Smith, thinking of these and other deaths . . . Both of Smith's memoirs tell a haunting story about being sheltered and fed, in all senses, by New York City.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR (Best Books of 2015)
 
“Patti Smith’s new book remains one of the best reading experiences I had this year . . . elliptical and fragmentary, weird and beautiful, and, at its core, a reckoning with loss. Much has been made of the book’s seeming spontaneity, its diaristic drift. But as the echoes among its discrete episodes pile up, it starts to resonate like a poem. At one point, Smith writes about W.G. Sebald, and there are affinities with The Emigrants in the way M Train circles around a tragedy, or constellation of tragedies, pointing rather than naming. It is formally a riskier book than the comparatively straight-ahead Just Kids, but a worthy companion piece. And that Smith is still taking on these big artistic dares in 2015 should inspire anyone who longs to make art. In this way, and because it is partly a book about reading other books—how a life is made of volumes—it seems like a fitting way to turn the page on one year in reading, and to welcome in another.” —Garth Risk Hallberg, The Millions

“Rich, inventive . . . Where Just Kids charted Smith’s path from childhood to celebrity, M Train does not move in a simple arc from one destination to another. It meanders between her interior life and her life in the world, connecting dreams, reflections and memories. Smith’s language lures the reader down this nonformulaic path. She doesn’t slap a convenient label on emotions; she dissects them. With each sip [of coffee], her ruminations deepen . . . M Train is less about achieving success than surviving it. Smith has outlived many of the companions who sustained her in her youth. She grieves for her husband and her brother; she mourns the artists with whom she had felt a connection when they were alive, including Burroughs and Bowles. And in a scene that strikes a universal chord, she mourns her mother . . . At the center of M Train is the passage of time—the way places and events can mean different things at different stages in a person’s life . . . Tender, heartbreaking.” —M. G. Lord, The New York Times Book Review
 
“Incandescent . . . moving, lovely. Patti Smith is a poet with a mindful of memories enough to fill M Train to the brim. Let’s be clear: every observation is beautiful. M Train is chiefly concerned with salvaging the pieces that, together, form a life entire . . . In its barest sense, the book is a series of cups of coffee around the world, drunk between waking and sleep. But once the memoir has sunk in its claws, these rituals become a framework for more meaningful observations. What is a life, if not a pattern interrupted by occasional revelations or surprises? Where Just Kids traced the linear progression of her friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and her coming of age in 1970s New York City, M Train finds its footing in shared experiences. It’s the universal—not rock ’n’ roll in particular—that haunts the reader most . . . Aging and loss tran…

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