The New York Times Reviews Patti Smith's M

The New York Times's Michiko Kakutani reviews Patti Smith's new memoir, M Train. Kakutani writes: "Whereas Ms. Smith’s haunting 2010 memoir, 'Just Kids,' centered on her early years in New York in the late 1960s and ’70s and her friendship with Mr. Mapplethorpe, this volume is more peripatetic, chronicling her peregrinations around the world and into the recesses of her imagination, though always returning to her home base in Manhattan." More, from the beginning:

Patti Smith’s achingly beautiful new book, “M Train,” is a kaleidoscopic ballad about the losses dealt out by time and chance and circumstance. Losing her husband, the guitarist Fred (Sonic) Smith, to heart failure in 1994 at the age of 45. Losing her brother, Todd, a month later to a stroke. Losing her early New York friend and roommate, Robert Mapplethorpe, to AIDS in 1989. Her book is about moving from a time when her children were little and “the things I touched were living” (“my husband’s fingers, a dandelion, a skinned knee”) to a time when she increasingly began to capture and memorialize moments from her life in photos and words — to create, as an artist, talismanic souvenirs of the past. Of which this book is one.

Musician, poet and photographer, Ms. Smith, 68, is remarkably attuned to the sound and sorcery of words, and her prose here is both lyrical and radiantly pictorial. Like her famous black-and-white Polaroid photos (some of which are scattered throughout the book), the chapters of “M Train” are magic lantern slides, jumping, free-associatively, between the present and the past, and from subject to subject. She captures a passing mood (melancholia she can turn in her hand “as if it were a small planet,” impossibly blue) as deftly as she conjures her cat Cairo (“an Abyssinian runt with a coat the color of the pyramids”) or a childhood memory (“a skate key on a cherished lace from the shoe of a 12-year-old boy”) or a sad, post-Sandy Christmas in the Rockaways. (“Styrofoam snowmen and waterlogged sofas were draped in tinsel.”) [...]

Continue at NYT.