Nice scattergun memories from Ondaatje.

I listened to his lovely voice reading this over the top story of his family. Reminded me if my favourite Corfu books by Gerald Durrell, high praise. Great characters, gorgeous descriptions.

While I was forced to read this book for the International Baccalaureate, this book wasn’t bad. Personally I am not a huge fan of memoir style writing, but some of the stories in here were captivating enough to keep me motivated to read the next chapter. If you enjoy the memoir style, give this a read.

Sometimes I find myself weary of the eighteen different books I've started reading and left sitting somewhere around my house, and I wonder if I'll ever finish reading any of them. In such times, I'll pick up a book by Michael Ondaatje and read it in two days. He is an angel, and his books have the flash & magnificence & abundance of the heavens.

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.

OK - wish there was more about Ceylon, would have liked to learn more - got to the end and am now well versed in the antics and irresponsible behavior of a privileged elitist minority. Its as if Ceylon going through independence and going from Ceylon to Sri Lanka never happened.

Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships.

This is a fragmented and haunted account of the author's family, an account which goes back to Sri Lanka--where the author hadn't lived since the age of eleven. This work easily could have been twice as long. It is perilous work sifting through the details of one's family. I suppose it isn't as traumatic when one grows up being made aware of the stress fractures and the splintered remains. Much is made of the differences between Canada and South Asia; the climate, fauna and flora are as integral to the tone of the narrative as any genealogical shenanigans.

Dnf

I’m technically supposed to read this for school, but I’m sick of reading about rich people. This isn’t the right time for this one.

Also: poetry’s my thing, but I was annoyed to find it in this book. Although it made its point, I was annoyed because it broke up the story. Ondaatje is critiquing this lifestyle. The poetry seemed to justify it.

Ondaatje's memoir about growing up in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) is filled with vivid, lush imagery.

Too bad his family stories are so uninteresting! Boring tales of drunk fathers, cantankerous grandmothers, and subdued siblings were made bearable by the author's writing skill.

Just not bearable enough to recommend this tome to others.

This was the book which had put me off of this offer so many years ago and yet now I breezed through it and enjoyed it so much. Guess I was just not in the right place at the time. So happy I read Anil's Ghost a few years back. Working my way through his books and a twinge of regret arises from time to time when I realize I am likely half done the collection!

Can’t even categorize this. If you’re not in to memoirs, you’ll hate this book. But if you’re pretentious and into memoirs, you’ll love this book.

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. t



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