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    Running in the Family
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    Running in the Family
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    Running in the Family
    Ebook200 pages2 hours

    Running in the Family

    By Michael Ondaatje

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India, " Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateMar 23, 2011
    ISBN9780307776648
    Unavailable
    Running in the Family
    Author

    Michael Ondaatje

    Booker Prize-winning novelist Michael Ondaatje is the author of many collections of poetry and several books of fiction, including In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient. He and his wife live in Toronto.

    Read more from Michael Ondaatje

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    Reviews for Running in the Family

    4/5

    328 ratings18 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I think Michael Ondaatje is a wonderful author, and I have enjoyed several of his books. However, reading about the irresponsibility and eccentricity of his Dutch/Sinhalese family grated after awhile so that I quit reading about halfway through the book. Kudos to the author for becoming such an outstanding author despite his heritage.
    • 5/5
      This is a poetic, lyrical book of memories and anecdotes about the author's aristocratic and eccentric Ceylonese-Dutch family. Like most family tales, some may have taken on a larger-than-life quality, with the basic story embellished in the retelling. My version is an audiobook with excellent narration by Ondaatje. His smooth, mellifluous voice conjures up the hot island of Sri Lanka, redolent with the scent of jasmine, and is perfect for this work. Fabulous!
    • 5/5
      Ondaatje’s prose is intensely evocative, impressionistic, magical writing. He writes of the smells and sounds of Ceylon, flowers that only bloom in the night, drunkenness, gambling and intoxicating love affairs. He writes of falling asleep in the afternoon, the curling beauty of the Sinhalese alphabet, the tree he climbed as a boy on his family’s estate. He writes about strange dreams, lizards, and crumbling rose palaces. This is a dream of a book, part poem, part family history. It represents to me all that is beautiful in language, in poetic imagery, and the construction of writing. His prose stuns me, it changes my feelings, the way I see the world and experience itself. This book is described as being ‘postmodern’, an assessment I thoroughly agree with. One of the hallmarks of postmodernism, to my mind, is work that is self-referential. What I love about Ondaatje’s books is that he examines narrative structure. He did this beautifully in ‘Divisadero’ where the narrative resembles a sort of tree with each story growing out of the next; limb upon limb. In ‘Running in the Family’ he places fragments side by side; poems, dreams, memoirs, memories, impressions. The fragments then lift and form and create a whole in the mind. The past and present intermingle. It’s very beautiful. It’s the sort of writing that I am intensely interested in. Like all of Ondaatje’s books, this work is deeply intelligent, multi-layered, rich, and dripping in poetry. I read this book very slowly, drinking it in, I never wanted it to end.
    • 5/5
      Still love it. A quirky little memoir about family with some awesome stories told so casually you just believe them, even when he tells you they might not be true.
    • 5/5
      Well, I like reading Michael Ondaatje, I like his style and his flow. I found this quite mesmerising.

      In some ways it reminded me of Empire Of The Sun by J.G. Ballard in that it speaks of a world that is not only long gone but also about as far removed from most peoples' experience as you can get. It's a window into another person's life which is where it is different from his novels, this is about his childhood and how that world was in that unquestioning way that children have when they have nothin to compare it to.

      Brilliant
    • 4/5
      Elegant, multi-faceted account of returning to Sri Lanka and exploring his own and his relatives' memories of the life of a rackety, eccentric Ceylonese family in his parents' and grandparents' generation. As always with family memories, different people remember different things, and the picture doesn't quite add up: Ondaatje doesn't attempt to force it into artificial unity. Ondaatje visited Sri Lanka at the end of the seventies, before the communal violence became serious, and he only refers very obliquely to the political problems of the island. They don't belong in this nostalgic account of how things were, but of course you can't read the book without keeping in mind the contrast between his idyllic picture of the thirties and forties and the grim reality of the eighties.
    • 2/5
      everyone else(except 1 person) seemed to like this. i don't like ondaatje. he goes on and i lose focus.
    • 4/5
      Blurring the lines between memoir and fiction, Ondaatje's book recounts his experiences visiting Sri Lanka as he explores his family history in what was then known as Ceylon. With rich and lyrical descriptions of the country and his family, the book is beautiful to read. Ondaatje manages to capture the disjointed nature of oral narratives that often accompany explorations of family history. Filled with beautiful imaginings of events involving various family members, actually recountings from family and friends, and more reflective passages on his experiences and individuals he calls family. There are also a few photos included at the beginning of each section that serves to remind the reader that as much as the book pushes the boundary of fiction, these are still real individuals and events. Even the few poetry sections are beautiful, reflecting a country that is both Ondaatje's home and yet exotic at the same time. Evocative and a rich exploration of the many different stories that make up any family history, Ondaatje captures the fuzzy boundary of history and story.
    • 4/5
      If you like the prose style of Michael Ondaatje then you will love this book. A series of vignettes about his and his families life in Ceylon. Ondaatje himself says that a well told tale is worth a thousand facts and some of the tales he tells about three generations of his family have probably grown taller by the retelling. The sketches of family life are at times nostalgic, then crazy and also sad as the stories of characters and a society now very much changed flit across theses pages; Interspersed with beautiful descriptions of the island particularly in the Monsoon notebook sections and some evocative poetry. A charming little book
    • 4/5
      Oh, the fantasy twenties, the bravenewworld twenties, the isla formosa twenties. Just in case the seething exploitativeness and class privilege of it all wasn't up in your face enough in Gatsby, in Brideshead, Ondaatje slaps you in the face with it. This is a literal colony, and the drunkest idiot son is gonna pay for all those tripping gin walks down cinnamon-scented paths by being, like, a major in the Coldwater Guards and safely protecting Ceylon from the Japanese. Ondaatje makes no apologies for being a scion of privilege, and he gets away with it, because this world is that intoxicating. Because more than we want to condemn this world of laughter and mystery and affairs and the great chain of family ties and light-hearted laughter and cold-blooded savoir faire in the face of the fact that all that stops you from being a human stain is that you're beautiful--more than we want to condemn it, we want to experience it. We want to be the ones who lived fast and made this tiny land our own. We want to fly, tonight, and it's a lot more honest to make that flight a flood, like Ondaatje does for his batty grandma Lalla, and to have it end in crushing brutal death and not be the less wonderful for that than it is to cover up and make it Peter and Wendy and "there'll always be an England." There won't and there wasn't, and the same goes for planter Sri Lanka, but the difference is the bright young Ceylonese things knew it, and it redeems them a little and makes them a lot more doomed and desirable. A fantasy world; one that evaporates in peacock cries and dew.
    • 4/5
      This is Ondaatje's attempt to come to terms with his strange and often tumultuous family history. Ondaatje was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and his grandparents were from rich and aristocratic families, descendants of Europeans who had colonized the island a couple of hundred years earlier. Ondaatje writes of his grandparents, his parents, and his childhood while weaving in incidents from his own homecoming after 25 years away. But the story eventually reveals itself to be focused mostly on Ondaatje's attempt to understand his father, a mostly gentle man who alternated between civility and utter drunkenness. Some of the stories are pretty hilarious--such as the several times his father drunkenly (often nakedly) hijacked trains and had to be picked up by family members at the next stop--but of course the reality of such a childhood is not glossed over; as one of Ondaatje's siblings remarked, "I showed what you had written to someone and they laughed and said what a wonderful childhood we must have had, and I said it was a nightmare." The book, by the way, is not an exhaustively researched family history, but more of a set of memories belonging to Ondaatje and others. Ondaatje conveys the hard-to-grasp nature of his own story by telling it un-chronologically; sometimes you think that the memory is his, but then you realize that it must be someone else's memory being told second-hand, but in such a way that you realize that Ondaatje has probably heard this story so many times that it's almost as though he were actually there (if that makes sense). Ondaatje says it best himself in the acknowledgments: "I must confess that the book is not a history but a portrait or 'gesture.' And if those listed above disapprove of the fictional air I apologize and can only say that in Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts."
    • 5/5
      Oondaatje's family memoir is a beautiful, evocative mix of poetry and prose, memory and inventiveness.Although he is based in Canada, Ondaatje masterfully captures the environment of Sri Lanka's cities and estates, and presents a compelling portrait of his eclectic family. Reading this book in the middle of English winter, I found myself suddenly a million miles away, in a land of coconuts and jasmine and secret marriages and drunken military officers holding up night trains.Even if you don't like memoirs and couldn't care less about Sri Lanka, read this book for the language. His poetry is exquisite, but so is his prose: tender, descriptive, nearly sing-song in places. An absolute must-read.
    • 3/5
      This is a collection of short stories, a small offering of poems, a few remembrances, some vignettes, a spattering of well juxtaposed historical facts and some black and white photographs. It is the memoir as scrap book, half evolving into a filial overture to a flawed but forgiven father. “Running in the Family” is more atmospheric than linear, more concerned with the rakish and entertaining essence of wealthy Ceylon in the first part of the 20th century than with any of the individuals that drink, dance and screw their way through its pages. Though Ondaatje sets out to “trace the maze of relationships in [his] ancestry,” he does not distress his content with a rigid chronology.There is little to anchor a reader who passes through Ondaatje’s impressions and learns disconnected facts about lizards, light infantry and railway travel. Unfortunately, the strongest pieces of writing (the “Passions of Lalla” chapter and the accounts of Papa Ondaatje ruining train trips for a whole country) show up the wispiness of the everything else. Once Ondaatje gets momentum with a character description and sinks his teeth into plot (however temporarily), he is at his best and most memorable. The sudden shift away from an engaging character who gets swept from the living or flown out of sight does create a certain wistfulness and sense of loss for the reader, which is in keeping with the overall tone of the memoir. But, it renders the more half-hearted chapters, poems and historical accounts less satisfying. That said, I have an unusually clear sense of what it must have been like to live in Ceylon at the time of the narrative and an unexpected, subtle wish that I actually was living amongst the humans who populate “Running in the Family.” Ondaatje’s people lived large, enjoyed themselves tremendously and had a wonderful, exotic and sensuous backdrop for their existence. (Though, the failure of any indigenous Ceylonese or persons of low income to appear in this book, does mean that a reader only gets a taste for the narrowest, most stratospheric segment of the population—whose ability to exist in narratives totally devoid of the people who must be picking and cleaning their fruit, making house and fixing everything that breaks is a little off-putting.)
    • 4/5
      We are taken into the almost extravagantly lived life of the Ondaatje family in Sri Lanka. The prose is as rich as the countryside. We see a family only step away from the colonial English. We suffer through the torrid heat, and we undergo an almost a wild west encounter. We can see how part of Ondaatje novelistic visage was formed from the stories of those around him while growing up and the re=encounter on two return visits.
    • 4/5
      Simple book, but very beautifully written.
    • 2/5
      Michael Ondaatje returns to his native Sri Lanka to learn the history of his large and moderately illustrious family. His prose strives for lyrical but is often ridiculous: "if I must die, I shall do it here on the white alphabet of the heaving boar's tusks." Worse, his family's stories are too over-the-top to be believable and though Ondaatje acknowledge's his family's penchant for exaggeration, he provides to few details of feelings, thoughts and personalities for us to connect with the vast family he describes. I can see why Ondaatje would have liked to know these stories; I can't see why he expected us to care.
    • 5/5
      Beautifully written, haunting memoir of his family history. I love the photographs.
    • 5/5
      An autobiographical account of the author's life and family history in Sri Lanka. Very well written and really entertaining! My favourite Ondaatje book.