An elegant series of portraits from Ondaatje crafted after visits to his childhood home of Ceylon (still Ceylon when he penned this in the early 80's). His colorful, troubled, exuberant family - Dutch, Sinhalese, Tamil- lived vivid llives in the early decades of the 20th century. Ceylon is as much of a character as any aunt, uncle, parent, sibling- seething with damp heat and swaying in lush, green waves of water and foliage. Ondaatje's memories and re-creation of events is loving and bemused, poetic and respectful. I'd like to have read more about these characters...

I've never read him before, but his style is so familiar.
A powerful and enchanting memoir.

Michael Ondaatje returns to his native Sri Lanka to learn more about his ancestral history.
The family chronicle spans over hundreds of years - and it is certainly not boring.
There are usually one or two eccentric aunts/uncles in a family, here eccentricity is … running in the family.
Apart from being a very personal account and a family reunion the book also offers a happy revisit to those having travelled to Sri Lanka .

A gorgeous memoir narrating Ondaatje's return to his homeland of Sir Lanka in the 1970s. The entire book is an evocative portrait of the sights, sounds, places and heat of Sri Lanka as Ondaatje looks back on his family history (with a particularly moving chapter on his late grandmother, whose personality leaps off the page) with a tender eye, often tinged with humour. There was so much I wanted to underline here and I'll definitely be reading this again so I can properly absorb the beauty; it was the perfect book to read while travelling around Sri Lanka but I would recommend this to anyone based purely on the hypnotic, shimmering writing.

ovo je bilo naporno

perfect book about family affairs and how little our memory holds onto things,, how little our words actually explain our thoughts

I wanted to touch them into words.
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How I have used them.… They knit the story together, each memory a wild thread in the sarong.
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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.

It's been almost a decade since I read this and it was wondrous to return to. The history of a family who lived in such a unique context it is hard to comprehend. "A well-told lie is worth a thousand facts." Dreamlike, hilarious, and tragic.

ONE OF MY FAVOURITE BOOKS OF ALL TIME! I would give this book 10 stars if possible! I loved Ondaatje's stories of traveling through Sri Lanka to learn about his family and the family stories that he included. I loved the pictures and I love how that everytime I re-read this book, it makes me want to travel. I have never felt about a book, the way I feel about this one.

Ondaatje’s family is as mythically crazy as Garcia-Marquez’s fictional Buendia clan. His father in particular—an epic binger, gin hole, naked hijacker of trains, and participant in elaborate, picturesque feuds:

And there was Lalla too, like a bee attracted to the perfume of any flower, who came up every other week solely to ransack the garden and who departed with a car full of sprigs and branches. With hardly any room to move or stretch, she rode back to Colombo, still as a corpse in a flower-packed hearse. In his last years my father was a founding member of “The Ceylon Cactus and Succulent Society” and this interest began during his time in Kuttapitiya—all because of his devious and defensive nature. He loved ordered gardens and hated to see beds ravaged by Lalla’s plundering. Gradually the vegetation at Kuttapitiya took on a prickly character. He began with roses, then Lalla wore gloves, and so he progressed to the cactus. The landscape turned grey around us. He welcomed the thorn bush, experimented with gnarled Japanese figs, retreated to pragmatic vegetables or spears of the succulent. His appreciation of growing things became more subtle, turned within a more limited spectrum and gradually Lalla’s visits tapered away. Her journeys were in any case made solely for the effect of arriving at friends’ houses in Colombo bearing soft rain-grown flowers.

Running in the Family (1982) is a family photographic collage, an album of lyrics, an archive of island gossip, a travelogue of its author’s visits to ancestral parishes and childhood sites. (A salad of Tamil, Portuguese, Dutch, Sinhalese and English ancestors makes for wonderful Firbankian names: Shelton de Saram, Sammy Dias Bandaranaike, Lalla Gratiaen.) I love the lore held in the honey-bright amber of his prose:

Most of the events in the erotic literature of Asia, one suspects, must take place in the mountains…

She loved the thunder; it spoke to her like a king.

On my brother’s wall in Toronto are the false maps. Old portraits of Ceylon. The result of sightings, glances from trading vessels, the theories of sextant. The shapes differ so much they seem to be translations—by Ptolemy, Mercator, Francois Valentyn, Mortier, and Heydt—growing from mythic shapes into eventual accuracy. Amoeba, then stout rectangle, and then the island as we know it now, a pendant off the ear of India.



n

Loved this. An amazing sense of place. Poetic

It is quite possible as someone with no affiliation to Sri Lanka or Sri Lankans to read the content of this book and believe that Ondaatje is making it all up. I thought so too, at the beginning.
But then, I remembered that he was not writing about the Sri Lanka this beautiful island had become, he was writing about the one that it was.

My father told me stories of my great grandmother, Mariah Vaas Gunewardene; who singlehandedly ran a fishing boat empire in the South in the 30's and 40's, who wore her keys carefully buried at her waist under the folds of her lungi, who smoked Cuban cigars and went top-less to the beach at 3 in the morning to help haul in the boats at high tide.

Even my father, decades later, pretended he wanted to become a Catholic priest just so he could get into a prestigious college on scholarship on his way to becoming a national athlete. At the age of 15, he got on a ship and sailed to England in the middle of a storm, nearly getting thrown overboard and worked at the Kensington Palace gardens to pay his way through university.

They were much more daring in the day. They didn't place value on the valueless as we do now.

Which is why Ondaatje's family's bizarre antics hit quite close to home. I read the first three quarters of the book between peels of laughter. He has such a way of describing atrocities that you can't help but sympathise with the perpetrator.

The last part was sober; as his father neared the end of his days, so did the vibrancy of the prose, mirroring the once eccentric man's dark despair.

I learned a lot too, between the adventures of his madcap relatives, a side of Sri Lankan history that is slowly but deliberately being erased from memory. Today, my country is trying to pretend that our past is noble and monoethnic when in reality, we are a bunch of mixed blood mongrels, everyone. And there's no shame in that, for I am proud of my heritage, no matter how bastardised and watered down it may be - but that is a story for another day.

The book is written haphazardly, the timeline is all over the place. Some stories begin and end, others end and begin, while others still drift off into the aether and are never resolved. It might be a bit confusing, especially for the unfamiliar, but once you finish you would find that it continues to resonate in your mind.

For me it was a cathartic experience, reading about places I've seen and been, the resthouses and train-routes I've traveled by all these years, converted into delicate prose and romanticised but still so very recognisable.

I hope Michael Ondaatje writes more books set here; because the Sri Lanka he writes about, is the Sri Lanka I want you to know.