maybe slightly less

like sitting at the kitchen table and listening to a decades long family gossip session, for better and for worse

I am not a good person to judge this book. I do not like short stories or books composed of vignettes. That is exactly what this book is. You do end up learning about Ondaatje' family, beginning with his grandparent s and ending with his parents. You do not learn much about Michael. The depiction of lush, verdant Ceylon, the changing landscapes, the valleys and mountains is captivating. But I was clearly having a hard time with the form of the chapters. There are chapters of poetry; they do not speak to me either. There were chapters consisting of just short bits of conversations.

Sometimes I was confused and simply didn't know what was being said!

Ceylon falls on a map and its outline is the shape of a tear. After the spaces of India and Canada it is so small. A miniature. Drive ten miles and you are in a landscape so different that by rights it should belong to another country. From Galle in the south to Colombo a third of the way up the coast is only seventy miles. When houses were built along the coastal road it was said that a chicken could walk between the two cities without touching ground. (page 147)

What is that suppose to mean, that with the chicken?????? That the cities were close? This must be over my head. It doesn't work for me. It is not terribly funny.....

I didn't particularly like reading about the lifestyle of drinking and partying and small talk and gambling, the lifestyle so predominant to this family and many others of their group. Drinking became a huge problem for particular individuals. Having recently finished Ava's Man, where drinking also played an important role, I wonder why I was so angry at the individuals in this book, while I was not in Bragg's book?

And now that I think of it, I adored Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps, which is composed of vignettes. Why did that go down my throat like ice-cream while this books had me choking off and on? Something is wrong between me and this book. I will say, that by the end I felt a deep affection for Michael's father, I was no longer angry at him. So something worked! Listen to this about his father:

He was amazingly protective. He would never let me stay with friends over the weekend, they would have to come and stay with us. And if there wasn't enough food to go around he would announce these signals such as "F.H.B.", which meant "Family Hold Back". We loved all those codes. (page194)

So I ended up having a soft spot fpr this man, Michael's father, irregardless of all his faults. For the most part, the craziness of the life-style bugged me to pieces. It was surreal, dream-like, crazy and bizarre, and the writing is too. Somewhere along the way the comment is made that those growing up in the 20s through to the 40s were immature and just simply did not have to grow up, not until the war came. I recognize this constant partying as perhaps something that characterized the 20s.

Anyway, these are my thoughts. I have mixed feelings for this book. Yes, I liked it, but not more. I also wish the book had taught me a bit more about Ceylon!

Michael Ondaatje returned to Sri Lanka, which he left at the age of eleven, to try to trace his roots. This book is a series of anecdotes formed from conversations with family members and others who knew his family. They were descended from Tamils and lived a very privileged life in the 1920s and 30s, until it all fell apart due to various influences including his father's alcoholism and mental illness.

I read this during a holiday in Sri Lanka and found it fascinating to put this lifestyle into context in some of the places we visited.

Honestly this was one of the most interesting books I've ever read, and especially given it was a class read, it was a really good book. There is so much hidden complexity, and by the end, you gain so much more understanding and empathy of each of the people in the book.

As usual, just amazing writing, moments of rich poetry. This is somewhere between family memoir and poetry and fiction. So many places where I stopped and re-read a sentence just to appreciate his craft. His family, especially his father, was quite fascinating and wonders where reality and the retold stories from others' memories overlap.

The after effects was "Warlight" was such that, I elevated Ondaatje to the level of Camus, as possibly my favourite author ( these things change, of course ). Yet there it was. As a result, I took into my hands his one poetry collection I have, "The Cinnamon Peeler" (abandoned 1/4th of the way last year) to read afresh, and also his memoir "Running in the Family" - the plan was that to read latter as extra reading ( meaning a page here, a page there, during lunch, waiting to pick a kid etc.), not trespassing upon that cherished domain of the limited reading time, and the former with a dose of just one or two poems a day. The former continues, and the latter is now complete. As expected, the reading allotments were as I planned till more than half the book was completed. Till past the 180th page, its abstract style, ensured that it could be read in that fashion. Till the 180th page, we hear of his ancestors, his parents, his aunts, his father's running ins with John Kotalawela, bathing in the rain in Wilpattu, his parents' drunken friends and relations, his father's carefree life style in England etc. The most interesting and concrete story till that time was his grandma's experience in the floods of 1947, at Nuwara Eliya. These abstract stories then feed the main theme, which becomes apparent in the next 50 plus pages. Why did Michael Ondaatje return to Sri Lanka in 1978 and 1980 ? It is for the fictional history, no doubt carried out with a lot of research, that he presents to us, but more so to his siblings Christopher, Jeniffer and Janet. There is a quote attributed to his brother, Christopher here:

"'You must get his book right,' my brother tells me. 'you can only write it once.' But the book again is incomplete" Michael was the youngest of four children, and it is possibly he who knew his father least. Michael has left Ceylon when he was 11, and after living with his relations after their parents' separation and divorce. To me, it felt that his trips back to, by then Sri Lanka, was to pick up whatever strands he could off his relations, their memories, and try to see who his father was - possibly his father who he didn't know well enough. The agony of Micheal is apparent in these last 50 odd pages -

"Her behaviour in his drunken moments was there to shock him in his times of gentleness when he loved muted behaviour"

"You see I thought they would have found out what a disgraceful family I had come from. Mummy had drummed this story into us about what we had all been through there."

"My loss was that I never spoke to him as an adult. Was he locked in the ceremony of being 'a father'? He died before I even thought of such things."

"You must understand all this was happening while his first family was in England or Canada or Colombo totally unaware of what was happening to him. That would always be the curse on us, the guilt we would be left with"

“There is so much to know and we can only guess. Guess around him. To know him from these stray actions I am told about by those who loved him. And yet, he is still one of those books we long to read whose pages remain uncut. We are still unwise. It is not that he became too complicated but that he had reduced himself to a few things around him and he gave them immense meaning and significance.”



To me, this was clearly the agony and the remorse of a son, who couldn't ever meet and get to know his father again - denied at an early age through the faults of his parents. While his father's actions from a youth suggest that he was more than a handful when drunk, it can clearly be read, he appears to be searching high and low for someone, who is to be blamed for this injustice that he had to endure - of never knowing his father well enough.



A son will always, as he grows more mature try to understand and read his father - "who is this imperfect man who fathered me, who is also imperfect to the core ? Whose actions and habits are deep inside of me, either encouraged, or discouraged ? Who laid the platform for me to write my story?" - the son would be thinking. Being denied of that, a son would be in agony, unable to open his heavy heart to any one else in the world. Michael, a great wordsmith if ever there was one, he had done his best to come to terms and understand the father he didn't know to his heart's content. And it makes a heart rendering reading, in those last 50 odd pages. The first abstract "salad", scanty at times, is the foundation for things to come.

"Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships. There are stories of elopements, unrequited love, family feuds, and exhausting vendettas, which everyone was drawn into, had to be involved with. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character—the way a person took on and recognized himself in the smile of a lover. Individuals are seen only in the context 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."

Beautifully written, poetic meteor about the author’s father and about growing up in Sri Lanka.

RATING: 4 STARS
(Review Not on Blog)

Michael Ondaatje is one of my favourite writers, even though my rating on his books may not reflect that. He is also an author I don't often recommend to other readers, especially non, new or BOTM (Book of the Month) readers. Ondaatje is a poet in all his writing. I have read his poems, novels and now nonfiction and all of them are so beautifully written. However, he is not always easy to comprehend. He shows instead of tells, and uses imagery that leaves you thinking about a sentence for days. Every sentence I read I want to own it. It takes me a while to read his books as I not only have to play with the words, I need to decipher all that he is trying to convey. If you want to know about Michael Ondaatje read wikipedia, but if you want to know Ondaatje through Ondaatje lens this is the book for you. This is fact mixed with a bit of fiction. Fiction as in imagery. This is one I will be picking up a few times to really understand it all. There may be updates to this review at a later date.

I infinitely preferred this book, by turns laugh out loud funny and heartbreaking, to any of Ondaatje's novels that I've read. The book is definitely fragmentary, and perhaps that keeps it feeling light, even though the prose (and poetry!) is first-rate and the subject matter often quite dark. In any event, as Ondaatje takes us on his journey of re-discovery of family and place in Sri Lanka, he has a deftness and a randomness that his (to me) overly determined novels sometimes lack. A voice you could listen to (on the page) for much longer than this book lasts.

Wow, this was so beautifully written. to be completely honest, I don't know how to rate this. I have never read a book like this before; it weaves in and out of memoir and autobiography and history and travel journal and poetry all with gorgeous prose. it feels more like experiencing a place and people than reading about them. That being said I sometimes had trouble staying engaged in the narrative because of how much it flips between being about the author's own feelings and experience to his family history, etc. I would sometimes become very invested in a passage but then the subject would change when I wanted to hear more. Overall, I definitely recommend this book but I think it actually would have been better if I went in knowing more about how the book would flow instead of expecting one continual narrative.

2 stars is a little harsh, I didn’t overly enjoy the book but I’m glad I read it. I read the first 75% on the train from Colombo to Kandy and the rest on my arrival at my B&B.

The book, and this sounds harsher than it is intended is the authors self indulgent exploration of his families past, that maybe could have been a private diary. The family had several misfortunes, but it was hard to feel much pity for them as I read about them drink and (what felt like) excess they had as I saw much poverty. In times it was slightly hard to follow and work out who was who.

I learnt a lot about the landscape of the country, about different customs such as guest books in rest houses. I’m surprised it didn’t touch on more politically especially given Ondaatje’s Tamil heritage, and based on timelines I presume would have been affected by the lead up to the civil war and the political decisions such as standardisation that lead to it.