Review of M Train by Patti Smith

Coffee-addict Patti Smith returns with another engrossing memoir-thing.

She writes well about writing. I find my reading tastes lining up with hers. She conveys her burgeoning obsession with visiting writers’ graves in far-flung places, touching down in Japan and hunting down the resting place of Akutagawa, Dazai, Ozu and others. I have never done that but I could see myself doing that. She wants to drink the alcohol left on Ozu’s grave
If she lives like she writes about her life she amasses moments, synthesizing days into fiction, poetry, and a steady hum of faith in herself, even as she leaves notebooks on planes and tests her body’s capacity to function under Balzac-level coffee consumption.
She writes to her friend William S. Burroughs, talking about his gun collection, without even mentioning what he did to his wife. No, she doesn’t seem to care. She calls in favors with a bunch of famous people. She’s always working on the periphery of social disturbance, traveling to Tangier for some obscure journalistic purpose, always on the move. Buckled down during a hurricane.
To read her work is to wander through her memories. It isn’t exactly random perhaps, but it progresses like a casual conversation, and proceeds through shimmering elegance into hard realism effortlessly. She watches a lot of cop shows. Her addictions are so genteel.
She falls in love with the Wind-up Bird Chronicle, which really won me over, kind of like she was taken by 2666 in her book, Year of the Monkey. The book, in short, wriggles its way into her own. She is swept away in the author’s tidal mystique—she acts like a Murakami character actually, and a Bolaño character at times.
She reads the audiobook with her noticeable accent I wouldn’t know how to place because it seems a conglomeration of her various personas which bear the traces of much rough dislocation—or maybe it’s just a Chicago+something else accent. She buys a home (a fixer-upper of a fixer-upper) but is able to write anywhere. She is often alone, chasing after the writing, being led from cafe to cafe. Paris or Mexico. Going way out of her way to drink the supposedly best cup of coffee on the planet. You get that Bukowski/ Henry Miller vibe where you have to wonder how these writers subsist off unexplained sources of income, fueling their culinary binges through the sheer radiance of their fame. Do they draw on some universal currency backed by not caring and being cool? Or does the lifetime of accomplishment and delving after the perfect combination of words crystallize into a singularity-like source of inspired rambling, both literarily and physically.