Running in the Family (Vintage International)

Michael Ondaatje is one of my very favorite writers!I watch him on YouTube to hear his voice reading his gorgeous poems and excerpts from his books. Running in the Family is so entertaining and a delight to read over and over!

"Running in the Family" is an impressionistically written and reflective memoir of Michael Ondaatje's eccentric Ceylonese family.The book begins with a series of disjointed stories about Ondaatje's parents and grandparents. I found this part somewhat hard to get through as Ondaatje drops into the stories without providing the reader with the necessary information to understand who the players are and why they are important. However, since the book is highly impressionistic in style, perhaps this approach works. After all, most of us learn about our family history in bits and pieces; we don't pick up yarns and memory bites in chronological order.The third section, "Don't Talk to Me about Matisse" is a literary treasure! Ondaatje weaves a travel journal with childhood memories. Ondaatje's journey through Sri Lanka and memory land is depicted with great passion and reflection: "I witnessed everything. One morning I would wake and just smell things for the whole day, it was so rich I had to select senses. And still everything moved slowly with the assured fateful speed of a coconut falling on someone's head, like the Jaffna train, like the fan at low speed, like the necessary sleep in the afternoon with dreams blinded by toddy."Ondaatje generously included several of his poems in the middle of the book. "The Cinnamon Peeler", with its strong sensuality, serves as a fitting metaphor for the stories about romantic interludes in the author's family. "The Cinnamon Peeler" is so beautiful, I plan to commit it to memory.Ondaatje dwells on the salient qualities of his relatives and homeland. If this book were a painting, it would be a mostly green wash of color with bright, blood red splashes. The red splashes could represent the tragedy so inherent in Ondaatje's family history. Alcoholism and mental illness rule the house in this family. There are many humorous moments, however, and Ondaatje delivers them with great bravado: "Lalla's great claim to fame was that she was the first woman in Ceylon to have a mastectomy. ... She kept losing the contraption to servants who were mystified by it as well as to the dog, Chindit, who would be found gnawing at the foam as if it were tender chicken." These hilarious memories give the reader a reprieve from the underlying tragedy like a much-needed downpour during a drought.In the final sections, Ondaatje slowly reveals the many layers of his father's sad, but remarkable life. One chapter, called "Dialogues" merely consists of bits and pieces of conversations about his father. Whether Ondaatje imagined these conversations or actually heard them retold is not important. They give homage to his father in a unique and poignant way.If you're looking for a travel journal on Sri Lanka, don't look here. But, if you want unforgettable impressions of an exotic land and a remarkable family, if you yearn for a memoir rendered with the finest of literary care, "Running in the Family" will surely please.

Years after immigrating to Canada, Michael Ondaatje is awakened by a wild, intense dream of Asia. The dream inspires him to return to the childhood home he left at age 11 to fill in the gaps of what he remembered as a wonderful, mystical place. He and present family members make two return journeys to Sri Lanka in l978 and 1980, interviewing, questioning, and wading through long lists of genealogies.Their first stop is an aunt's 1700's residence nestled within an 18th century Dutch fortress in Northern Ceylon. This is just the beginning of the wonders he and family members encounter as they continue to visit old places and family members, amplified by the fantastical escapades of his ancestors that their childhood eyes and ears hadn't known. Given the dense, sensitive prose of Michael Ondaatje, this book is a wonder of both the personal and historical.

It is not my favorite Michael Ondaatje novel but it is still an interesting read. I still think it is worth a read.

A model of its genre. Original, stylish, witty, evocative writing about a time and society now entirely (?) lost. Often laugh-aloud funny, while serious in general intent. Illuminating about life in Sri Lanka in the early 20th century, burgher society in particular. Read it anyway, but if you visit Sri Lanka, don't fail to take the Ondaatje family as travelling companions.

The writing is beautiful. Oondatje skillfully uses vivid language that makes the memoir engaging and poetic (not purely for the language, but also for actual poems Ondaatje chooses to include). He manages to engage all of the reader's senses and create world that often feel too appetizing to leave. For instance, Ondaatje brings us in to his replaying of sounds from a recorded Sri Lankan night: "In this silent room (with its own unheard hum of fridge, fluorescent light) there are these frogs loud as river, gruntings the whistle of other birds brash and sleepy, but in that night so modest behind peacocks they were unfocussed by the brain--nothing more than darkness, all those sweet loud younger brothers of night." He is constantly using such lovely details to bring the reader into this foreign world, and it was his skill with language that kept me reading to the end.And furthermore, there is such an intimacy in Oondatje's writing about family members. The minutest details, such as the way he noticed the changes in his mother's handwriting, display to a reader how well he does know these people, and how much he cares about them. For all the stories he tells, there is never a sense of bitterness or wanting to shame anyone. He tells very good things and he tells very bad things. He brings the people alive in his retelling of family history. In one instance, Ondaatje writes with humor the story of his father's multiple casual engagements and, later, his father's alcoholism. But he never laments that he's been psychologically ruined. There isn't bitterness. Instead, the only lament seems to be that he never knew his father as well as he'd wished he had. Near the end of the memoir he includes an anecdote of being with his father two days prior to death. Ondaatje writes, "You know it is a most relaxed thing when you sit with a best friend and you know there is nothing you have to tell him, to empty your mind." It's when he writes statements like these that one feels the genuine nature behind the memoir. Ondaatje brings the reader into both a foreign country and foreign family, yet makes us feel affection for them just as well as he does.