Running in the Family
by Michael Ondaatje
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Read in May, 2005
In it's entirety:
"Memory and Texture in Running in the Family"
N.B.: This hasn't been proofread
Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family chronicles the history of a family in an unfamiliar land. To most readers of English, the names and places in Running in the Family will be unfamiliar, as good as fantasy—it might as well be Narnia or Middle Earth. This unfamiliarity dissipates slowly through the course of the novel, as the places and names become familiar, and the rich...more
"Memory and Texture in Running in the Family"
N.B.: This hasn't been proofread
Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family chronicles the history of a family in an unfamiliar land. To most readers of English, the names and places in Running in the Family will be unfamiliar, as good as fantasy—it might as well be Narnia or Middle Earth. This unfamiliarity dissipates slowly through the course of the novel, as the places and names become familiar, and the rich...more
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Read in September, 2007
recommends it for:
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A lovely memoir by Michael Ondaatje that leaves you with an impression of how interesting and crazy it was to grow up in Ceylon with two parents who were often involved with large amounts of alcohol, drama, and gossip. I picked up this book because I have vivid memories of how haunted I was by Ondaatje's poetic style in The English Patient. I was not disappointed with his memoir - some absolutely beautiful passages - but I have to say I felt a little like I was losing interest at times because o...more
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Read in February, 2008
Ondaatje'quiet endeavor is that of repairing, in some rarefied way, the sacred relationship between parent and child. This universal impulse dissolves the need for him to fulfill a specific post-colonial agenda. The fact that the parent with which he seeks reparation is deceased makes this task even more painful. As the reader follows this author's nostalgic pilgrimage to his (sometimes) imaginary homeland it must be remembered that Ondaatje possesses only fragments of memories with which to ass...more
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Read in August, 2007
Michael Ondaatje’s memoir Running In The Family is an unusual book. It isn’t a classic narrative; there are little episodes about his family, reports of his return to Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in the 70s, poems, and other anomalies. This book first came to my attention through Nick Hornby’s inspiring column in The Believer magazine called What I’m Reading. It’s really a quirky little book, but entertaining, heartfelt, and informative. He had a very colorful family. His father was an alcoholic...more
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Read in July, 2007
recommends it for:
creative non-fiction fans, experimental form fans, family heritage buffs
The book is about the author's family history in Ceylon. he traces the alcoholic, aristocratic, mixed lineage, and eccentric Ondaatje family as well as some of the history of this exotic colonialized island. Most interesting to me is that this book shows how you can do anything when it comes to form. The point of view shifts, the time and place shifts, the genre shifts, and it works. There are beautiful poems smack dab in the middle of book which add to the stories and elaborate a different k...more
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Read in November, 2007
I love Ondaatje, if you couldn't tell from my list. Unlike most of his books which have a clear-ish well-flowing narrative, this is more like a bunch of vignettes of his crazy fabulous family, who were given power and high society by the colonial era and powers. This interesting snapshot of a strangely positioned elite in the era of its destruction gives insight into the origins Ondaatjie's perspective on colonialism and post-colonialism, which is a constant in his later books. As usual his i...more
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recommended to Ginnie by:
Pdmc30
Michael Ondaajte's Running In the Familyis a supremely satisfying narrative. It unfolds much like a conversation among people with a shared history; it is a distillation, and the narrative is remembered from different perspectives, and the narrative, a remembering, is told to suit the teller -- whom the author identifies; in consequence, questions are not always answered, and the brevity -- some chapters span a single page--may leave the inattentive reader (who misunderstands the authors...more
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Has a copy to sell/swap
recommends it for:
humans
rather than reviewing this book, i'll just transcribe a passage that should convince you pretty soundly:
"you must get this book right," my brother tells me. "you can only write it once." but the book again is incomplete. in the end, all your children move among the scattered acts and memories with no more clues. not that we have ever thought we would be able to fully understand you. love is often enough, towards your stadium of small things. whatever brought you so...more
"you must get this book right," my brother tells me. "you can only write it once." but the book again is incomplete. in the end, all your children move among the scattered acts and memories with no more clues. not that we have ever thought we would be able to fully understand you. love is often enough, towards your stadium of small things. whatever brought you so...more
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Read in October, 2007
Like all the other Ondaatje books I've read, this was is gorgeously written. It is not what you would expect from a memoir: there is little structure, no conventional narrative thread, a huge number of characters that it's difficult to keep straight, and lots of jumping around in time. He even admits to making some of it up. All of these things might sound like faults, but his wielding of language makes them all work beautifully.
I would also recommend this book to anyone who'd like to see a...more
I would also recommend this book to anyone who'd like to see a...more
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Read in March, 2008
I can see now why my professor from my Memoirs class loves this book. It's told in the way he loved to teach, going in and out of memories and anecdotes. It's got a really nice ending, however, that really brings the book together. Ondaatje recalls memories of his parents, and some of the memories aren't his. But they all carry themes of illustrating his father's quiet personality that he never quite grasped or his mother's dramatic personality he gathered as best he could during her lifetime. W...more
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Michael Ondaatje's parents and grandparents were mixed white and South Asian and part of the colonial government in Sri Lanka when it was called Ceylon, and they drank a lot and did a lot of fun things. This is fun to read about.
Parts of this book are ecstatically perfect but other parts of it are too pretty. So the book gets only three stars because too pretty is one of the most boring ways writing can be. Plus there are these two or three bad orientalist poems included in the book, I don'...more
Parts of this book are ecstatically perfect but other parts of it are too pretty. So the book gets only three stars because too pretty is one of the most boring ways writing can be. Plus there are these two or three bad orientalist poems included in the book, I don'...more
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Read in June, 2008
Well this was just lovely. Multiple threads of personal and family history. A lot of it is stories passed down and best-guess accounts. I mean, it's not a cut-and-dried biography and it's all the better for that. I had to keep reminding myself it was rooted in reality. Ridiculous stories. An account of Ondaatje's rich and eccentric family history in Sri Lanka through the 20th century.
This is a great writer writing passionately and evocatively about his homeland, which is entirely different t...more
This is a great writer writing passionately and evocatively about his homeland, which is entirely different t...more
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Read in July, 2007
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. Sometime...more
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Read in July, 2007
After seeing the movie The English Patient, one almost forgets the amazing complexity of this author. Through finely drawn characters and underlying and interweaving stories, the reader is allowed to take away a totality of this man's family. Seen through snippets of myth, truth, memory imperfect, overheard conversations and witnessed lives a potrait emerges that is not historical fact but rather the truthful texture and depth of their lives. The author remains less forthright about the impor...more
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Read in January, 2005
recommended to Tawny by:
Dr. Keith Lawrence
Favorite lines:
1. "During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed."
2. "No story is ever told just once."
3. "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."
1. "During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed."
2. "No story is ever told just once."
3. "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."
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Beautiful book. Although a memoir, has a surreal feeling, like magical realism. Here Ondaatje describes a scene from his parent's youth:
"A hand cupped the heal of a woman who wished to see the stars more clearly. The men laughed into their tumblers. They all went swimming again with just the modesty of the night. An arm touched a face. A foot touched a stomach. They could have almost drowned or fallen in love and their lives would have been totally changed during any one of those evenin
"A hand cupped the heal of a woman who wished to see the stars more clearly. The men laughed into their tumblers. They all went swimming again with just the modesty of the night. An arm touched a face. A foot touched a stomach. They could have almost drowned or fallen in love and their lives would have been totally changed during any one of those evenin
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A sometimes limpid, sometimes vague and echoing look at the author's and his family's past. The style is reminiscent of his The English Patient, but feels more intense for being about real people. Michael Ondaatje grew up in Sri Lanka in a family of characters that might be unbelievable were they in one of his works of fiction. The story is told in a rich and suggestive way, and evokes the scattered nature of memory and of hunting for the past.
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Read in November, 2007
There were so many great elements in this book--exotic setting, interesting characters, dramatic events, poetic language (although the sections in verse seemed sort of, well, bad)--and yet somehow I could never get excited about it. Maybe something about the lack of...dramatic arc in the present narrative? I don't know. Maybe it was great. Maybe it was my fault. I just couldn't dance to it.
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Like Marilynne Robinson's novel "Housekeeping," this memoir is beautifully written on the sentence level. The prose is a thing of beauty. But honestly, I can't remember a thing about the book. I'm reminded of the comment Anthony Lane of the New Yorker once made about Ondaatje's "The English Patient": It's so beautifully written as, for all intents and purposes, to be unreadable.
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Read in December, 2005
dang but does this fellow have an interesting family. tale is quite grand and would have been better sans the chapter or two about himself. dood, you are boring as hell. but your ancestors, hell yeah... who in their right mind wouldn't want to live on the plump of ceylon having drunken tennis, cricket, soirees, etc. to occupy one's time?
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book data (includes all editions)
avg rating (all editions): 3.97 (553 ratings) avg rating (this edition): 3.96 (511 ratings) number of reviews: 67popular shelves
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quote
"There are stories of elopements, unrequited love, family feuds and exhausting vendettas, which everyone was drawn into, had to be involved with. 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 that exchange of gift and character - the way a person took on and recognized in himself the smile of a lover...
Where is the intimate and truthful in all this? Teenager and Uncle. Husband and lover. A lost father in his solace. And why do I want to know of this privacy? After the cups of tea, coffee, public conversations ... I want to sit down with someone and talk with utter directness, want to talk to all the lost history like that deserving lover. "
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