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Original Title:	Running in the Family
Edition Language:	English

Running in the Family

Michael Ondaatje

Paperback | Pages: 208 pages

Rating: 3.84 | 7473 Users | 648 Reviews

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This book is hard to categorize as it is part family memoir, part travelogue and part autobiography. There’s even a section of poetry. Ondaatje, best known for his novel, The English Patient, was born in Ceylon, the island off southern India, now Sri Lanka. His ancestry was a mix of native Sinhalese and Dutch, but the European part predominated since they were a member of the small minority of Christians on the island and certainly upper class. Sri Lanka is about the size of West Virginia, so his travels took him to every corner of the island. I appreciate the map included that showed most of the places mentioned in the story. We hear some about famous authors who lived there for a while such as D. H Lawrence and Pablo Neruda. And we get a bit about the country’s history such as the revolt of young people in 1971 when as many as 4,000 were killed. To show how upper crust the extended family was, they all had servants and nannies. They left Colombo seasonally in a caravan of cars to avoid the heat and go to the hill towns where they created a resort atmosphere, racing horses and swimming, playing golf, tennis and croquet. English and other Europeans were disliked as colonial masters unless they married locals in which case they were fully accepted into the local society. In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to the island for several months to have his family meet his relatives and to catch up on his own family history. His mother had separated from his father when the author was as an infant. He left the island in 1954, when he was eleven, to move to England with his mother. So to some extent the author is writing about events he never really witnessed. And what a wild family it was. Two people stand out for their crazy antics: his father and an aunt, a sister of his mother. Let’s just look at his father: a kind man that they loved, but he was at times a raging alcoholic. Technically he suffered from dipsomania, a condition where he could go for a few months without any alcohol but then go on a binge and drink multiple bottles of gin in a day for weeks at a time. He had been a director of tea plantation and later a major in the Ceylon army. In one of his bouts of blind alcoholism he took his army issue gun and commandeered a train, going about naked. His influential friends helped cover things up. Family memoir spills over into family legends, and some of his antics and those of an aunt seem a stretch to believe. Another major theme of the book, I’ll call homage to the tropics. Perhaps because the author was visiting his homeland from Canada, he is re-enamored of the heat, rain on metal roofs, bats and peacocks coming into houses, the riot of flowers and plant tendrils reaching into the windows. This lush tropical exoticism makes think of another book I reviewed, Tale of a Certain Orient by Milton Hatoum, set in Brazil. And there’s humor. “So how did your grandmother die?” “Natural causes.” “What?” “Floods.” “My father continued with his technique of trying to solve one problem by creating another.” “He was my father’s and Noel’s closest friend and the best man at several weddings he tried to spoil.” After England Ondaatje went to college in Canada and eventually became a Canadian citizen. He has written about a dozen other books which, beside The English Patient, include The Cat’s Table, Warlight and Anil’s Ghost. Top photo: Sri Lanka landscape from ak8.picdn.net/shutterstock Pettah Market in Colombo from shutterstock Colombo skyline from cdn2./media/1075/colombo-sri-lanka Map of Sri Lanka from ezilon.com/maps The author from irishtimes.com

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Title	:	Running in the Family
Author	:	Michael Ondaatje
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Special Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 208 pages
Published	:	November 30th 1993 by Vintage (first published 1982)
Categories	:	Autobiography. Memoir. Nonfiction. Biography. Travel

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Ratings: 3.84 From 7473 Users | 648 Reviews

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Though I've written five memoirs and reviewed countless more, I'm not sure there's one that keeps bringing me back and back like Running in the Family. The opening page alone is worth the price of the book.

Beautifully written, poetic meteor about the authors father and about growing up in Sri Lanka.

My eighth encounter with Running, this time for my dissertation. I am only 25 but still I am overwhelmed by the feeling that I will be reading and loving Ondaatje in continuous and gradually different ways all my life.

I wanted to touch them into words. *How I have used them. They knit the story together, each memory a wild thread in the sarong.*During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed. So our job becomes to keep peace with enemy camps, eliminate the chaos at the end of Jacobean tragedies, and with the mercy of distance write the histories.

these 203 pages were some of the longest 203 pages i have ever read. the writing is lyrical (albeit sometimes very confusing) and there are some particularly shining vignettes, but other parts, i really had to shoulder through.

A lovely tease of a book. Part memoir and part atmospheric poetry, each chapter hints at an event or anecdote from Ontdaaje's ancestors' lives in Sri Lanka. Generations of expats and patriots come and go, shown to the reader in brief glimpses and short chapters of prose or poetry. The writing is, as always, lyrical, evokative, clever and beautiful, but at the end I found I wanted more. Gorgeous hints at abiding and neurotic family dynamics that skim across the surface of a deeper story.

Even though I read this almost 20 years ago, I remember it as being one of the best family histories I ever read. Hilarious in parts, and along with Cat's Table which was written much later, provides insights into one of my favorite authors.