Running in the Family

big Ondaatje fan--was keen to read this memoir about his Sri Lankan ties (fun to be familiar with some of the places he mentions!)

3.5

This book made me feel stupid, but in truly the best way possible. To be smart enough to write this is a feat in itself. The beauty, the prose, the portrait of family, the question of truth, all come together to create one of the most stunning novels I have ever read. I immediately called up izzy and told her to drop everything and start reading this, it is so so worth it.

This book is seemingly undeveloped and unfinished; like a draft for a novel later. But don't let that fool you. You need to pick up a copy and read this book because its beauty lies in its irregularity and simplicity. It is disjointed and follows a post modern style. Sometimes there are poems and stories and sometimes just pictures and conversations but all dealing with Ondaatje's family and his early life in Sri Lanka. This memoir will shock you and make you laugh but all the while, you cant stop admiring Ondaatje's language, the style and this 'gesture' (he says, 'the book is not a history but a portrait or 'gesture''). My favourite chapters are 'The Passions of Lalla', 'How I Was Bathed' and the poem 'To Colombo'. I love the prospect of opening this book anywhere and rereading chapters every now and then.

Memoir 3 of my 2019 Non-fiction November reading frenzy. Can you believe I put off reading this one because I thought it was about running? Instead Ondaatje uses a few visits to Sri Lanka in the 1970s to take a trip down memory lane, with stories from his family told interlaced with poetry. In some ways it's a strange privileged point of view since he only mentions the violence that would have already started in one passing comment, but he moved away from the island as a child so the majority of memory to recall comes more through the stories of the older generation of his family.

Also this book has lush descriptions of food and place. I am investigating Sri Lankan curry recipes, which apparently have been making a come back!

What a fun little book. At first I had trouble figuring out what it was: a collection of short stories; a memoire; a novel? I would now say yes and no to all those questions. It is a perfect book to read in the bathroom, sections could be a few lines or a few pages, just enough.

Perhaps this quote at the end of the book explains it as well as anything:
While all these names may give an air of authenticity, 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. (206)

Quotes that caught my eye

Beside the fridge I tried to communicate some of the fragments I knew about my father, my grandmother. “So how did you grandmother die?” “Natural causes.” “What?” “Floods.” And then another wave of the party swirled me away. (22-23)

The fan hangs on a long stem, revolves lethargic, its arms in a tilt to catch the air which it folds across the room. (24)

There was a large social gap between this circle and the Europeans and English who were never part of the Ceylonese community. The English were seen as transients, snobs and racists, and were quite separate from those who had intermarried and who lived here permanently. (41)

Gradually she began to notice the shocked faces of the passengers facing her across the aisle. At first they looked disapprovingly and soon began whispering to each other. Lalla looked at the man next to her who had a smug smile on his face. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Then she looked down and saw that his hand had come over her left shoulder and was squeezing her breast. She smiled to herself.
She had not felt a thing. Her left breast had been removed five years earlier and he was ardently fondling the sponge beneath he gown. (42-43)

The rulers of the country genuinely believed that betting eliminated strikes; men had to work in order to gamble. (48)

Then the races were over, groups would depart for dinner, dance till early morning, go swimming and have a breakfast at the Mount Lavinia Hotel. Then to bed till noon when it was time for the races once more. the culmination of the season was the Governor’s Cup stakes. Even during the war the August races were not to be postponed. Ceylon could have been invaded during the late afternoon as most of the Light Infantry was at the race track during these hours. (49)

The horses, drummers, everyone else, seemed to have a purpose. The devil dances cured sickness, catarrh, deafness, aloneness. (52)

It seems that most of my relatives at some time were attracted to somebody they shouldn’t have been, love affairs rainbowed over marriages and lasted forever—so it often seemed that marriage was the greater infidelity. From the twenties until the war nobody really had to grow up. They remained wild and spoiled. It was only during the second half of my parents’ generation that they suddenly turned to the real world. (53)

But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other’s presence. No one speaks of the exchange of gift and character—the way a person took on and recognized in himself the smile of a lover. Individuals are seen only in the cont4ext of these swirling social tides. It was almost impossible for a couple to do anything without rumour leaving their shoulders like a flock of messenger pigeons. (54)

The maps reveal rumours of topography, the routes for invasion and trade, and the dark mad mind of travellers’ tales appears throughout Arab and Chinese and medieval records. The island seduced all of Europe. The Portuguese. The Dutch. The English. And so its name changed, as well as its shape,--Serendip, Ratnapida (“island of gems”), Taprobane, Zeloan, Zeilan, Seyllan, Ceilon, and Ceylon—the wife of many marriages, courted by invaders who stepped ashore and claimed everything with the power of their sword or bible or language. (64)

Ceylon always did have too many foreigners … the ‘Karapothas’ as my niece calls them—the beetles with white spots who never grow ancient here, who stopped in and admired the landscape, disliked the “inquisitive natives” and left. (80)

And if this was paradise, it Had a darker side. My ancestor, William Charles Ondaatje, knew of at least fifty-five species of poisons easily available to his countrymen, none of it, it seems, used against the invaders. Varieties of arsenic, juices from the centipede, scorpion, toad and glow-worm, jackal and “mongoose,” ground blue peacock stones—these could stun a man into death in minutes. (81)

I still believe the most beautiful alphabet was created by the Sinhalese. The insect of ink curves into a shape that is almost sickle, spoon, eyelid. The letters are washed blunt glass which betray no jaggedness. Sanskrit was governed by verticals, but its sharp grid features were not possible in Ceylon. Here the Ola leaves which people wrote on were too brittle. A straight line would cut apart the leaf and so a curling alphabet was derived from its Indian cousin. Moon coconut. The bones of a lover’s spine. (83)

For years I thought literature was punishment, simply a parade ground. The only freedom writing brought was as the author of rude expressions on walls and desks. (84)

Before I leave, she points to a group photograph of a fancy dress party that shows herself and my grandmother Lalla among the crowd. She has looked at it for years and has in this way memorized everyone’s place in the picture. She reels off names and laughs at the facial expressions she can no longer see. It has moved tangible, palpable, into her brain, the way memory invades the present in those who are old, the way gardens invade houses here, the way her tiny body steps into mine as intimate as anything I have witnessed and I have to force myself to be gentle with this frailty in the midst of my embrace. (112)

…’Akjoutha’—a card game that normally takes at least eight hours. It was a game the Portuguese had taught the Sinhalese in the 15th century to keep them quiet and preoccupied while they invaded the country. (126)

But there was another problem to contend with. One whole carriage was given over to high-ranking British officers. They had retired early and, while the train witnessed small revolutions among the local military, everyone felt that the anarchic events should be kept from the sleeping foreigners. The English thought Ceylon trains were bad enough, and if they discovered that officers in the Ceylon Light Infantry were going berserk and upsetting schedules they might just eave the country in disgust. Therefore, if anyone wished to reach the other end of the t4rain, they would climb ont the roof of the English carriage” and tiptoe, silhouetted by the moon above them, to the next compartment. My father, too, whenever he needed to speak with the driver, climbed out into the night and strolled over the train, clutching a bottle and revolver and greeting passengers in hushed tones who were coming the other way. Fellow officers who were trying to subdue him would never have considered waking up the English. They slept on serenely with their rage for order in the tropics, while the trains shunted and reversed into the night and there was chaos and hilarity in the parentheses around them. (154)

But the train kept shunting back and forth, never reaching Kelaniya, because at this point my father was absolutely certain the Japanese had mined the train with bombs, which would explode if they reached Colombo. Therefore, anyone who was without a military connection was put off the train at Polgahawela, and he cruised up and down the carriages breading all the lights that would heat the bombs. He was saving the train and Colombo. While my Uncle Noel waited for over six hours at Kelaniya—the train coming into sight and then retreating once more to the north—my father and two officers under his control searched every piece of luggage. He alone found over twenty-five bombs and as he collected them the others became silent and no longer argued. (155)

While we eat, an amateur theatre group from Colombo which is producing Camelot receives permission to be photographed on the grounds. The dream-like setting is now made more surreal by Sinhalese actors wearing thick velvet costumes, pointed hats, and chain mail in this terrible May heat. A group of black knights kisses Arthur beside the tank of Australian fish. (159)

Twenty degrees cooler up here than in Colombo. And a sourceless light that seems to brighten the landscape from underneath, as if yellow flowers in the garden are leaking into wet air. (166)

An hour later I am standing in the hall with Susan when I hear a pistol shot. Blue waves of flame. The house—hit by lightning, hit at the fuse-box on the wall just above my head. I am so shaken I act calmly for the rest of the afternoon. Lightning has never touched this house before even thought, perched on top of a tea estate, it seems an obvious target. The bolt is a signal for the end of quietness and the weather bursts open windows and steps into hallways. (166)

With each swing he witnessed the state of the room and corridor. A glimpse of cobwebs quickly aging, undusted glass. No sweeper for weeks. And nature advanced. Tea bush became jungle, branches put their arms into the windows. If you stood still you were invaded. Wealth that was static quickly rotted. The paper money in your pocket, wet from your won seat, gathered mould. (189)

Here where some ants as small as microdots bite and feel themselves being lifted by the swelling five times as large as their bodies. Rising on their own poison. Here where the cassette now starts up in the next room. During the monsoon, on my last morning, all this Beethoven and rain. (203)

To the extent that Michael Ondaatje’s fiction is informed by autobiography, this is his family’s autobiography informed by fiction. Ondaatje understands that every story told us by and about our family is only half true; the rest is re-telling, half-lies, fiction. In the first chapters, Ondaatje re-imagines the heady, romanticized days of upper-class, 1920s Ceylon during the time of his parents’ courtship—days full of drunkenness, moonlit dancing and swimming, brawling, horse races and affairs. This is followed by the dissolution of his parents’ marriage (events that forced him into exile from his lush Sri Lankan childhood after his mother immigrated to England and he had to follow five years after) and his parents transformation from wealthy scions of two of Ceylon’s best families into an alcoholic poultry farmer and house keeper. Gradually the fiction shifts to something closer to reportage—we get verbatim quotes from Ondaatje’s siblings, half-siblings and relatives, which expose the extent to which the father we were introduced to in the first half is partly a character of Ondaatje’s making. Ondaatje shows his hand, the fiction of his non-fiction. His writing, as always, is lush, poetry in prose. Each chapter or section could be read as a complete story of its own. Each is a mini-narrative, though the whole resembles what Ondaatje refers to as a ‘portrait’ or ‘gesture’. Running in the Family might be a semi-fictional memoir, but for me it’s one of the most truthful, not to mention beautiful, that I’ve ever read.

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.