Sebald, whose work Smith greatly admires. The ghostliness of the gray tones renders the photographs intriguingly impenetrable, in productive tension with the text as in the novels of W.G. Who,” Smith writes, “I was thinking of French time-traveling children with Scottish accents breaking the hearts of the future.” Integrated into the text throughout are black-and-white Polaroid photographs taken by Smith as markers of her travels.
These moments of reverie often arise from the mundane after watching an episode of “Dr. Unlike her previous memoir, whose formal prose style and allegiance to linear chronology often felt at odds with Smith’s poetic sensibility, “M Train” embraces the fragment, the digression, the defamiliarizing image.
This rich, varied inventory includes stones from Genet’s grave site, TV detective shows, Murakami’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” Hurricane Sandy, a secretive society dedicated to the work of continental drift theorist Alfred Wegener, a worn black coat, Smith’s late husband Fred Sonic Smith, and many cups of coffee - enjoyed on Smith’s front stoop in the West Village, in Veracruz, Mexico, and, most often, at her favorite neighborhood writing spot, Café ’Ino. 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,” Smith’s captivating follow-up to her National Book Award-winning memoir “Just Kids.” “M Train” takes us on a journey through the “stuff” of Smith’s bookshelves and suitcases, as well as of her mind and memory. Already traveling very light (somehow having left her suitcase and laptop at her hotel) Smith writes, “I dumped the meager contents of my sack onto my bed, examining them over and over as if the notebook would appear in the negative recesses between the other items.” Though disappointed, she consoles herself by acknowledging that she has “enough stuff.” Days later, the lost notebook appears in the mail, with no return address or note, and Smith takes its mysterious return in stride.
Upon returning home to New York from a long trip to Japan, Patti Smith discovers that she has left her Moleskine writing notebook on the plane.
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