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M Train

by Patti Smith (Goodreads Author)

3.91 · Rating Details · 15,184 Ratings · 1,703 Reviews

From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids: an unforgettable odyssey into the mind of this legendary artist, told through the prism of cafés and haunts she has visited and worked in around the world.

M Train is a journey through eighteen "stations." It begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the w ...more

Hardcover, 256 pages

Published October 6th 2015 by Knopf (first published October 2015)

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Community Reviews

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Jan 04, 2016 Darwin8u rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: aere-perennius, 2015, memoir-autobiography-diary

"Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all."

- Patti Smith, M Train

description

My second Patti Smith memoir. This one was more experimental and nonlinear than Just Kids (which still wasn't exactly linear). It was filled with dreams, detective shows, talismans, cats, constant travels, coffee, more coffee, missing things, memories, loose threads, graveyards, hotels, photographs, and miles and miles of beautiful, lyrical Patti Smith p ...more

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Dec 09, 2015 Elyse rated it it was amazing

I listen to Patti Smith's audible. The very first thing I notice was her
voice. Her raspy eastern accent was mesmerizing.

As I was walking, I could picture Patti in the cafe she sat drinking coffee.
She says..."It's not so easy writing about nothing".
Easy or not ...I had a warm smile on my face listening to everything she had to say - at times aching -and soooo loving this woman.

There is a mystery about Patti Smith... which adds to her beauty.
Her mind is fascinating. A coffee drinker, loner, ...more

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Nov 17, 2015 Diane S ☔ rated it really liked it

Sometimes the right book finds us at the right time. For me this was the book. No linear, no plot to speak of, just musings and meanderings of a creative woman. Search for the perfect coffee, cafés, Hurricane Sandy, her obsession with detective shows and the way she enters into the lives of authors and novels. At times her writing is poetic, at others very poignant, especially when thinking or remembering her husband, Fred and her children when they were young. Her photography, travels, ...more

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Oct 10, 2015 Kelsey rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I can't believe Patti Smith wrote a book about drinking black coffee and watching serial crime dramas and it's the best thing I've ever read.

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Nov 30, 2015 Gary rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: photography, aesthetics, camus, memoir-biography-diaries-letters, cats, rimbaud, literature-travel, avant-garde

Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch once said in an interview that if all culture breaks down, he's following Patti Smith. Much of the pleasure of reading Smith's nostalgic M Train is that it offers fascinating insights into her interior life, her dreams, her quixotic travel adventures, her literary obsessions (listed in my Comment below), and her minimalist, bohemian tastes for such things as black coffee, brown bread with olive oil, Polaroids, word games, moleskines, detective stories, and her favorite ...more

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Jan 31, 2016 Julie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: bio-autobio-memoir, read-2016, best-of-2016

Reading the lovely Proustian interlude that is M Train, I felt like a shadow-angel trailing Patti Smith, from Café 'Ino down the block from her New York apartment to the far-flung places in her past and present that twirl like ribbons in her poetry, her songs, her art. M Train is a meditation on this artist's life, more kaleidoscope than memoir, a shifting wonder that spills pieces of colored glass memories.

The clarity of Patti Smith's language, the fragility of her voice, made me want to wrap ...more

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Jan 23, 2016 Michael rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, travel, memoir, new-york-city, japan, germany, art, essays, michigan, paris, poetry, morocco, photography

I thrived on this one as she shared how she was influenced by certain books that I favor and suceeded in engaging me on surprising adventures and missions, even ones I would I never consider for myself. She believes in details of writings and specific places as portals that allow one to channel people one cares about. That was a thrill when it came to elements of books I loved like Bolano’s “2666” and Murakami’s “Windup Bird Chronicle” and appetizing for others not yet read, like Bulgakov’s ...more

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Nov 11, 2015 Joseph rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: biography, punk-rock

M-Train by Patti Smith is a collection of stories by the poet laureate of punk rock. Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses.

To be honest, I have been a Patti Smith fan since 1978. I have all her albums, seen her in concert, and own several of her books including number 86 of 100 of WIIT. I was really surprised at how well received and the ...more

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Oct 11, 2015 Maxwell rated it liked it

Shelves: i-own-it, non-fiction, 2015

In M Train, Patti Smith creates something deeply personal and lyrically beautiful, but not something that will necessarily resonate with a wide audience.

Not quite a follow-up to her 2010 National Book Award winning memoir, Just Kids, M Train is Smith's ode to coffee, art, travel, Haruki Murakami, her late husband, growing old, Rockaway Beach, The Killing and other surprisingly disjointed facets of her life. Her fascinations are endless, and she lives quite like you'd expect an artist to live; ...more

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Dec 08, 2015 Mona rated it really liked it

Poetic, Meandering Meditation on Loneliness, Love, and Loss

Patti Smith's latest memoir, M Train, is more rambling and poetic, less coherent and focused than "Just Kids". Yet, I found it almost as moving, but in an entirely different way. "Just Kids" was an emotional tribute to a beautiful connection between two twin souls, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. "M Train" covers wider ground.

The M train actually exists in the NY City subway. I'd forgotten it. I may have ridden it once (if ever). It ...more

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Feb 08, 2016 Lyn rated it really liked it

In my life I have had various musical periods where I would want to listen to one artist exclusively for a period of time, exhausting myself on listening over and over again to all the media I could get. There was a long Led Zeppelin period back in HS, also a Doors period and The Police. In college I had a REM period and U2. At other times, sporadically over the years I have experienced this binge listening and I always enjoy the time, its like meeting a new friend and wanting to spend all of In my life I have had various musical periods where I would want to listen to one artist exclusively for a period of time, exhausting myself on listening over and over again to all the media I could get. There was a long Led Zeppelin period back in HS, also a Doors period and The Police. In college I had a REM period and U2. At other times, sporadically over the years I have experienced this binge listening and I always enjoy the time, its like meeting a new friend and wanting to spend all of your extra time, and making more time, to spend with that person. I have also done this with writers, spending weeks and even months, reading every book or story from them I could get my hands on.

At some point I was in the middle of a long The Clash marathon and I would listen to London Calling or Combat Rock over and over, sometimes rewinding and listening to the same song over and over. Following this period was a shorter Bruce Springsteen period. But for a brief time, maybe only a few weeks, like a torrid and clandestine affair, I was introduced to Patti Smith and I was enraptured.

What struck me most, and I can still see the sunlight flashing past as I listened to her music in my car, or the night sky outside my room, was the vibrancy of her music. Although she could sing about troubling subjects, she never seemed outright angry, only alive and resplendent in her stridency. Songs like “Dancing Barefoot” and “Free Money” demonstrate her edgy but ultimately human, and vulnerable, worldview – a perspective that is more often than not personal and immediate.

Of course her 1975 album Horses was a lovely gem; she was a tough skinny girl who could belt out lyrics and be artsy, but it was also entertaining. I could imagine her dancing on stage and moving with the rhythms. I always thought of The Doors 1971 album LA Woman when I listened to Horses, and I guess the most direct connection is the poetry. But whereas Morrison came across as bluesy and world-weary, Smith was on the attack. She was anarchic and spirited but not as Sex Pistols nihilism but rather in a practiced emotionalism that wanted to send a message but also wanted to dance and have fun.

Patti Smith would have been a great girlfriend.

Her 2015 book of musings and curious observations M Train reveals that the 69 year old may have slowed down some, but her inquisitive and energetic mind is as effervescent as ever.

Sometimes pensive, frequently introspective as she looks back over a long and colorful life, she is always energetically questioning her surroundings, looking for answers and more questions to ask, easily able to be caught up in a book or idea, and with the freedom and ability to pick up and travel and see some part of the world, or visit the grave of a lost artist. The ubiquitous black coffee and black bread with a dish of olive oil in cafés all over the world was a familiar and intimate detail.

Throughout the book I found myself smiling at something she had written or a way in which she had expressed a thought. Her poetry was never far from the surface and this fluency of artistic demonstration coupled with her ever present practicality and immediacy (so much like her music) was pleasing.

Another element of this book that was especially enjoyable was her frequent and list worthy referencing of artists and works, from books to films to music. This reminded me of Jo Walton’s 2011 fantasy work Among Others. I saw another reviewer had listed all of the artists in a comment following his review and I want to copy this down and use as a part of my own “to-be-read” library list.

Whether you are a Patti Smith fan or not, this is a very well written and very enjoyable book. If you are unfamiliar with her or her work, this would make for an excellent introduction to this extremely talented and multi-dimensional artist.

description

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Dec 05, 2016 Janet rated it it was amazing

Shelves: insomnia-companions

A very quiet, elegiac book, memories linked one to the next--that's the train, the M train. In tone it reminded me more of the works of W.G. Sebald than of her earlier book Just Kids. It has none of the exuberance of that memoir of youth--in which she recaptured the tone, the feeling, of youth. This is the voice, the mind, of an older person looking back through a tangible scrim of loss. And yet, her memories are very much a child showing you the contents of his pockets, his array of A very quiet, elegiac book, memories linked one to the next--that's the train, the M train. In tone it reminded me more of the works of W.G. Sebald than of her earlier book Just Kids. It has none of the exuberance of that memoir of youth--in which she recaptured the tone, the feeling, of youth. This is the voice, the mind, of an older person looking back through a tangible scrim of loss. And yet, her memories are very much a child showing you the contents of his pockets, his array of child-treasures. It's an image that recurs in various ways throughout the book, from "what she carried" in her own lightly packed bags on journeys from Tangier to Japan to London… contents of pockets, of drawers, tiny bits of sacredness.

In my favorite section of the book, she and her then-new husband Fred Sonic Smith voyage to the prison of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni in French Guiana, once the jumping off place to Devil's island, closed in 1930 as inhumane. It was crazy yet thoughtful pilgrimage in honor of Jean Genet, the criminal turned writer and a hero of Patti's--who always wanted to be imprisoned there, the very pinnacle of a French criminal career. He never succeeded, but she went to find a stone to bring back for Genet, who was still alive at the time.

Though she never completed that circuit--until late in the book, when she took the stone to Genet's grave in France--this early episode has many of the earmarks of the entire book: a peek into the life she shared with a man who fully embraced who she was, and possessed many of the eccentricities and enthusiasms she did. Who understood that we live on the symbolic as well as on the real level (as Tennessee Williams says in Night of the Iguana, the realistic and the fantastic.). It is a pilgrimage, and Patti is nothing if not a literary and artistic pilgrim, doing much to revisit the sacred spots of an artist's legacy. I adored this aspect of the book, as a great lover of such pilgrimages--maybe it's part of being a writer, which is about preservation of human memory.

So many pockets with so many treasures--stones, pens, leaves, tickets, a lost toy Fred Smith always liked to keep with him, a shred of one or another true cross. Her apartment full of such treasures, autographs, memorabilia--bits of the Real, imbued with the symbolic. Photographs of her travels, odd and full of secret meaning-- including the mysterious Sebald-like photographs in the book, all shot with a square Polaroid camera. Of course she would photograph with a Polaroid--it is unique, in that there's only one image-- there's no negative, only an original. So a Polaroid itself becomes a sacred and irreplaceable artifact.

Patti Smith has a very strong relationship with physical objects which she handles, owns, wears. When she loses her faithful coat, she mourns it as if it was a child or a friend. Naturally, a person like this always wears the same things, eats the same things, sits in the same place in her favorite cafes--a certain self-monasticizing which isn't so much about spartan-ness as the necessity for a deep emotional investment in the ritual object.

Pilgrimage and treasure, ritual objects, lost worlds and people form the fabric of this intensely moving and yes, sad book. The feel of it haunts you long after you finish reading it. I didn't get so much of a "jump up and make everybody read this" reaction to the book that I had with Just Kids, its more a difficulty shaking it off, like a dream that speaks to you so deeply, you can't just run around doing your thing the next day, you carry it around with you, turn it over in your palm at odd moments. It's a pocketful of treasures, of things and times lost, that you want to handle and dream about. ...more

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Oct 10, 2015 Tosh rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: books-to-purchase

"M Train" is perhaps one of the most romantic books of being a writer, and those who likes to read. What can be better than reading and writing in a small hip cafe, and watching the world go by. And on top of that, visit every cool writer's grave site - from Europe to Japan. Patti Smith is not a hard person to figure out. She conveys the spirit of being a book nerd as well as a rock n' roll lunatic. In many ways, it's a very simple image of a writer/artist. Yet it is the simple aspect of it that ...more

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Mar 20, 2016 Duane rated it really liked it

Shelves: rated-books, reviewed-books, non-fiction, 21st-century, memoir, 2016-book-challenge

I remember this tv commercial where a guy comes down the stairs, he is dressed and has his luggage in hand. He stops in the foyer, picks up a dart and throws it at a map of the world on the wall. The idea being that he has the time and resources to travel anywhere at any time. Well, that's Patti Smith, but instead of darts she uses random thoughts, or passages from books, or memories. She is always on the move, both physically and spiritually, seemingly trying to soothe her battered and tortured ...more

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Jan 06, 2016 MARTI rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, american-literature, biography-memoir, non-fiction

Hiçbir şey hakkında yazmak kolay değildir. Böyle başlıyor söze bu kez Patti Smith. Hiçbir şey; gittiği cafeler, ziyaret ettiği mezarlar, gördüğü rüyalar, hayalleri, polaroid makinasıyla çektiği siyah beyaz fotoğraflar.. Şairlerle gezginlerin bir tımarhanenin sadeliğini bulabileceği ufak bir sığınak.

Çoluk Çocuk'tan farklı bir kitap bu, ama onun kadar lirik, iç acıtan bir anlatımı var. Farkına varmadan hafif ama daimi bir keyifsizliğin içine sürükleniyorum. Depresyon değil bu, daha çok melankoliye ...more

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May 01, 2016 Lynx rated it really liked it

Shelves: biography-memoir, own

Writing this review is difficult because it's hard to explain in words the effect Patti Smith has on me. She is one of the few artists who never let me down. She has this incredible way of turning even the most unpoetic things in life into beautiful prose. In this book of shorts she shares with us memories from her travels, her family and what inspires her creativity.

Her stories and stunning prose would be enough to make this a fantastic read for me, but her words always go well beyond that. Eve ...more

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Mar 31, 2016 City Lights Booksellers & Publishers rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

"Captivating . . . rich, varied. How to mourn for what’s lost without allowing loss to take over? While leaving space for what’s lost to return in an old or new form? These are the questions at the heart of M Train, [which] takes us on a journey through the 'stuff’ of Smith’s bookshelves and suitcases, as well as of her mind and memory . . . M Train embraces the fragment—moments of reverie [that] arise from the mundane. Integrated into the text are Polaroid photographs [that are] in productive ...more

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Dec 24, 2015 Char rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audio-book, non-fiction, autobiography, from-library

Patti Smith wrote a book about nothing and I am less than enchanted.

I admit to knowing hardly anything about Patti Smith. She has always been a fascinating figure to me, so when I saw this audio book available at my local library, I put a hold on it, because I wanted to learn more about her and her life. Unfortunately, I didn't learn as much as I thought.

I discovered her love for her husband, Fred, and that she lost him while he was still relatively young. I learned that she has two children. I ...more

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Nov 19, 2015 Bonnie rated it it was ok

Shelves: non-fiction-memoirs-and-bios, arcs, 2015, i-m-a-winner

‘I’m sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.’

Patti Smith carries us through her esoteric stories of the past and present in this short story/essay collection. M Train reads like an internal journey, a solo exploration. She recalls cafes visited all around the world, writing or simply sitting and reminiscing while drinking an insane amount of coffee that makes my own addiction to caffeine seem laughable. While Smith seems completely content with her own company ‘I’m sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.’

Patti Smith carries us through her esoteric stories of the past and present in this short story/essay collection. M Train reads like an internal journey, a solo exploration. She recalls cafes visited all around the world, writing or simply sitting and reminiscing while drinking an insane amount of coffee that makes my own addiction to caffeine seem laughable. While Smith seems completely content with her own company and the adventures she undertakes alone, there’s still an underlying sadness when recollecting the loved ones she’s lost and the memories that still haunt her.

-What are you writing?
I looked up at her, somewhat surprised. I had absolutely no idea.

Ultimately, this accurately sums up this non-linear story collection. Random, non-cohesive thoughts that bounce around her lifetime from past to present with no indication of time. It is possible for randomness to possess interest and there is no doubt that Patti Smith has led a most interesting life, such as the descriptions of her trip to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni in northwest French Guiana to visit the remains of a French penal colony where criminals were kept. Of all the places in the world to visit though, only Patti Smith would decide to visit an old abandoned prison at the end of the world. Nevertheless, it was interesting, but while it was all very informative and her writing is forever fluid, none of it ever felt as if it had much substance. Her descriptions of her trip to Germany to attend a conference with the Continental Drift Club, of which she is a member strangely enough, were fascinating but then she goes on to describe how on her return trip home she decided to stay in London to binge-watch some crime shows on the BBC. Fascinating and then… not.

Just Kids was stunning and poignant and her writing transported the reader back to a long past period of time. While her writing is still top-notch and her talent is undeniable, M Train was simply too meandering and tangential for my liking. The triviality of these stories are clearly meaningful to her since our experiences in life are what make us who we are today, but the importance is easily lost when not experienced firsthand but only recapped from memory.

‘I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we think we won’t, that we are different. As a child I thought I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realize, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology.’

I received this book free from Goodreads First Reads in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. ...more

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Dec 02, 2015 Bjorn rated it really liked it

Shelves: usa

I saw Patti Smith play live for the umpteenth time this summer. I don't think she could give a bad concert if she tried, but this was one I was a bit wary about: Like all aging rock stars, she was going to play her most popular album (Horses) live in its entirety. It's a setup that, for most artists, becomes a dull exercise in nostalgia and note-perfect reproduction. As Jim Reid of the Jesus And Mary Chain pointed out in an interview when they set out to play Psychocandy live a few years ago, th I saw Patti Smith play live for the umpteenth time this summer. I don't think she could give a bad concert if she tried, but this was one I was a bit wary about: Like all aging rock stars, she was going to play her most popular album (Horses) live in its entirety. It's a setup that, for most artists, becomes a dull exercise in nostalgia and note-perfect reproduction. As Jim Reid of the Jesus And Mary Chain pointed out in an interview when they set out to play Psychocandy live a few years ago, their concerts back then were never faithful reproductions of the studio material, yet if they were to sound NOW like they did back then, fans who only knew the album would complain about it not being authentic.

I shouldn't have worried, though, because if there's anyone who can pull this sort of thing off, it's Patti Smith. Not only because she's kept working with (as far as life and death allows) the same musicians ever since, but also because her entire career and Horses in particular have always been about subsuming yourself in what Lethem called the ecstasy of influence. Horses was always basically a sermon using rock'n'roll and poetry as holy writ; 40 years on, she just has to acknowledge that Horses itself has become part of that gospel. The 2015 version doesn't sound dated or nostalgic, nor is it a radical rearrangement as Dylan or Reed might have done, it's just ... lived in, a bit grey and wrinkled, not as limber as it once was but still refusing to back down.

Come on, man! I am PURE! I am ready to change the fucking world! Come on, motherfuckers! Come on! Come and get me!

Which leads us to M Train, her second memoir after the brilliant Just Kids , but this time starting in the Now: Patti Smith, grey, creaky-jointed, widowed and literal Grandmother of Punk, sits in her favourite cafe in the Village, sipping coffee and reading and taking notes. Not for anything in particular, but she just woke up from a dream where she was told that "It's not so easy to write about nothing." "I could do it, if only I had nothing to say," she responds. And sets about doing that, which of course in a way means trying to say everything.

Where Just Kids had a central story set squarely in the past - her dream of becoming an Artist (irrelevant which kind), her relationship/friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, their respective rise to fame and self-awareness, with a coda set after his death - M Train is far less focused. That's not necessarily a bad thing; I'd gladly listen to Patti Smith ramble on about the phone book. Much like Dylan's Chronicles, it's not a tell-all memoir for those who want to know juicy personal details; you get to know a lot about Patti Smith, but little that concerns her actual career (the few times she even acknowledges that she's a musician can be counted on the fingers of one hand), and much more about how she sees the world and how it shapes her. She talks about books she's read and loved from Rimbaud to Murakami, people she's admired, TV shows she's following, the house she bought just a week before hurricane Sandy hit it, her various private travels all over the world (or just across the street) to visit other drifters alive and dead and collect memories with her notepad and her camera... And the still lingering grief from her husband's death 20 years earlier, that's mellowed but never goes away. She sleeps in Frieda Kahlo's bed, she visits Ozu's grave, she gets mugged, she drinks copious amounts of coffee, and she never stops thinking about it, filtering it through all that holy writ of how others have experienced the same things.

I saw a quote the other day to the effect that books are how humans update their software. M Train, using that metaphor, is one long personal debug, going over alternately hilarious and deeply moving, and sure, once or twice it goes overboard and becomes exactly as hippyish as you'd expect of an aging cat lady poet. But that's part of what Patti Smith is, and it wouldn't be her without it. At least twice, she seems to read my mind and responds (very specifically) from the written page to something I'd been thinking aboout IRL just hours earlier. In most books, I'd write that off as coincidence; but this is that rare memoir that feels not like a monologue but a dialogue, and I feel honoured to have gotten a chance to talk to her. ...more

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Feb 14, 2016 Diane Barnes rated it liked it

Unlike a lot of fans of this book, I could not connect with Patti Smith. It may be that she is too intellectual for me, or it could be that our sensitivities just don't merge. The writing was beautiful, and the essays kept me reading and wondering, but I never "got" exactly what she was trying to say. But it was amazing to be witness to her meanderings on the page. I will probably read "Just Kids" at some point, to see if a more linear tale might be different.

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Nov 26, 2015 Selin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, non-fiction, owned-books

M Treni de tıpkı Çoluk Çocuk gibi çok güzel. Bu kitapla ilgili yazmayı planladığım şeyleri ve çok daha fazlasını kitabın çevirmeni Seda Ersavcı'nın benden önce yazdığını gördüm, tekrara gerek yok, şuradan okuyabilirsiniz: http://t24.com.tr/k24/yazi/gundeligin...

Bir de şimdiye dek iki kitabını (Zemberekkuşu'nun Güncesi ve 1Q84) okuduğum Murakami'yi sevemedim. Bir gün yeniden okumaya niyetlenirsem tek sebebi Patti Smith olacak. :)

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Nov 02, 2015 Scott Adams rated it did not like it

I read "Just Kids" and thought, "Wow, this is amazing! Why am I not a huge Patti Smith fan?" Then I read "M Train" and realized, "Oh yeah. Now I remember."

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May 16, 2016 Holly rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: firstreads, nonfiction-self

Disclosure: I received an Advance Readers Edition of this book through the Goodreads FirstReads program.

Not so much a follow-up to Just Kids as a stand-alone collection of musings, M Train is just a collection of Patti Smith's clunky thoughts. She's a competent writer, but ultimately, there's not much to see below the shimmery surface. Smith writes in poetic metaphors, but she never actualizes them or examines them in any detail. She details her coincidentally lyrical dreams, but stops there and ...more

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Nov 23, 2015 Amanda rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: memoirs-biographies

I adored reading M Train. It felt like a glimpse into the unique mind of a generous and beautiful soul. Smith has such a lovely writing style- lyrical with wonderful imagery and evocative language. The book is chock-full of insight and revelation.

I would suggest attentively reading it because it is written with unclear transitions between past and present, dream and reality. I would also recommend keeping a pen and notepad handy for jotting down the many literary references. M Train left this t ...more

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Jan 13, 2016 Michael Livingston rated it it was ok

You know how they say other people's dreams are boring? Nobody told Patti Smith. Smith recounts what feels like dozens of her dreams in this relatively slim volume - some of which spark interesting reflections and reminiscence, but most of which just struck me as pretty dull. Dreams aside, there are lots of nice moments in this book - ruminations on creativity, loss and love - but there were also long passages devoted to tv show The Killing (and not even the good, Swedish version!) and to ...more

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Oct 19, 2015 Becca rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir

I read a lot of memoirs. A good memoir for me takes a slice of the writer’s life and illuminates a deeper and more universal meaning. A good memoir is honest and vulnerable, seeking to understand, to share experience. A good memoir says “Come sit with me, let me tell you what happened, where I’ve been, what I’ve learned. Let me show you something about yourself you might recognize."

M Train is a good memoir.

Patti Smith, whose book jacket blurb describes her as “one of the most remarkable multi p I read a lot of memoirs. A good memoir for me takes a slice of the writer’s life and illuminates a deeper and more universal meaning. A good memoir is honest and vulnerable, seeking to understand, to share experience. A good memoir says “Come sit with me, let me tell you what happened, where I’ve been, what I’ve learned. Let me show you something about yourself you might recognize."

M Train is a good memoir.

Patti Smith, whose book jacket blurb describes her as “one of the most remarkable multi platform artists working today,” puts her soul on the page in this book, a book she calls “the roadmap of her life.” Told through the lens of various coffee shops all over the world where Smith has spent hours and hours sipping coffee, reading, and writing, reading M Train is akin to being on a deep reflective journey with her.

So the “M” - is it for Memory? Meaning?

Perhaps it’s for Michigan, where Smith met her beloved husband Fred, and where she lived with him so happily. “Michigan,” she writes. "Those were mystical times. An era of small pleasures. When a pear appeared on the branch of a tree and fell before my feet and sustained me."

Maybe it’s for Musing, which she does so well on the nature of life, of work, of memoir itself. “Is the reader familiar with me? Does the reader wish to be? I can only hope, as I offer my world on a platter filled with allusions."

It could be for Meditation, which this book invites the reader to do with its stream of consciousness-like structure and its laconic, dreamy prose. “I dreamed of opening a place (a cafe) of my own. I thought about it so much I could almost enter it...I imagined threadbare Persian rugs on wide-planked floors, two long wood tables with benches, a few smaller tables, and an over for baking bread. No music no menus. Just silence black coffee olive oil fresh mint brown bread."

Perhaps the M stands for Mourning, which she so clearly still does for her husband Fred, though he has been dead for decades. “I barely read on the plane. Instead I watched the movie Master and Commander. Captain Jack Aubrey reminded me so much of Fred that I watched it twice. Midflight I began to weep. Just come back, I was thinking. You’ve been gone long enough. Just come back. I will stop traveling; I will wash your clothes."

Though Smith takes us all over the world as we travel with her through her past, it is this elegiac quality of this book that most appeals to me. In her mid-60’s now, Smith looks at life through a lens that’s becoming quite familiar to me, seeing all that’s been gained but also longing for that which is lost and never to return.

“We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother’s voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow."

M Train is a beautiful book in every sense, including the physical, making me feel sorry for those readers who chose a digital edition. It’s sepia toned cover photo of the author in her favorite cafe protects a rich brown cover. The pages are thick and glossy, and include the author’s signature Polaroid images. It’s comfortably hefty, and provides the tactile reader with a very satisfactory reading experience.

Sometimes a book touches us in ways we would never have imagined. I bought this one on something of a whim, but it proved a worthwhile purchase and is a welcome addition to my memoir library. ...more

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Dec 22, 2015 Jeff Jackson rated it it was amazing

Better than "Just Kids." Wide-ranging reflections on life and literature that manage to feel both effortlessly digressive and unified as a book. Sections on Genet, Dazai, Murakami, Bolano, Rimbaud - plus singing Buddy Holly songs with Bobby Fischer, Arctic explorer clubs, Hurricane Sandy, and lots of coffee. Seemingly casual tales of melancholy, memory, and creation that build to a stirring conclusion.

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Feb 08, 2016 Sera rated it really liked it

Shelves: favorites

"Kendi kitabımın içinde yaşamıştım. Hiçbir zaman yazmayı planlamadığım, zamanı ileri geri kaydettiğim kitabımın. Kendi katiyetleri içerisinde kusursuz olan anları yeniden yaşamıştım."

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Jan 11, 2016 Connie Ciampanelli rated it it was amazing

Other than her co-writing with Springteen and recording “Because the Night,” her knocked-it-out-of-the park cover of The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” and the iconic covers of her albums, "Horses" and “Easter” both photographs taken by her close friend Robert Mapplethorpe, I knew little about Patti Smith. I didn’t know she was a respected and honored writer and photographer. Her earlier book Just Kids sat just at the edge of my consciousness; I was intrigued by the universally positive review Other than her co-writing with Springteen and recording “Because the Night,” her knocked-it-out-of-the park cover of The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” and the iconic covers of her albums, "Horses" and “Easter” both photographs taken by her close friend Robert Mapplethorpe, I knew little about Patti Smith. I didn’t know she was a respected and honored writer and photographer. Her earlier book Just Kids sat just at the edge of my consciousness; I was intrigued by the universally positive reviews of her latest work, M Train. Happily, I received it this past birthday, a gift from my husband.

M Train is not “about” anything. It is not a story, nor an autobiography. It is a lovely volume (“New York Times” correctly calls it “achingly beautiful”) of musings and reflections, a fluid if meandering journey through Smith’s vivid dreams, deeply rooted memories, and present-day reality. I am unfamiliar with some of the people that she references from her many different worlds (the explorer Alfred Wegener, novelist Robert Bolano), but I revel in her heartfelt, elegant writing.

Unglamorous and simple living, Smith comes across as a woman who cares deeply about those who have touched her life: family, friends, and those who have impacted or influenced her, whether personally, emotionally, or artistically. She goes to extremes to honor them, crossing continents to put stones on Jean Genet’s grave, traveling with her husband Fred Sonic Smith to visit an abandoned French prison colony, to Japan to visit the homeland of Haruki Murikami, to Iceland for a meeting of the esoteric Continental Drift Club, of which she is a member.

There is a thread of loss and sadness weaved throughout M Train: the heartbreaking loss of Fred at age forty-five, followed by the unexpected passing of her brother, Todd, a month later. The frequent loss of precious belongings: a favorite coat, her cherished copy of Murikami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, her old Polaroid camera (with which she took many of the gorgeous two-tone photos included in M Train).

Here she reflects on the day of Fred’s memorial service:

The evening of the service, my brother, Todd, came upstairs for me, but I was still in bed.
“I can’t do it,” I told him.
“You have to,” he said adamantly, and he shook me from my torpor, helped me to dress, and drove me to the church. I thought about what I would say, and the song, ‘What a Wonderful World” came on the radio. Whenever we heard it Fred would say, Trisha, it’s your song. Why does it have to be my song? I’d protest. I don’t even like Louis Armstrong. But he would insist the song was mine. It felt like a sign from Fred, so I decided to sing “Wonderful World” a cappella at the service. As I sang I felt the simplistic beauty of the song, but I still didn’t understand why he connected it with me, a question I had waited too long to ask. Now it’s your song, I said, addressing a lingering void.

Yet Patti Smith is never self-pitying, and as well as with wistfulness she writes with humor. She takes comfort in her two children, Jackson and Jesse, and in her cats, in her many and varied close friendships, in her simple possessions, in her solitude, in her writing, in travel and in food, in her fascination with television detective shows both at home and in the U.K.

I read M Train through once. It is a book that I will keep close at hand to dip from time to time. Patti Smith’s writing resonates deeply in my heart. It is a book I will never forget.
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About Patti Smith

PATTI SMITH is a writer, performer, and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary merging of poetry and rock. She has released twelve albums, including Horses, which has been hailed as one of the top one hundred albums of all time by Rolling Stone.

Smith had her first exhibit of drawings at the Gotham Book Mart in 1973 and has been represented by the Robert Miller Ga ...more

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“Nothing can be truly replicated. Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line.” — 24 likes

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