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Running in the Family

3.85 of 5 stars 3.85 · rating details · 3,219 ratings · 285 reviews

In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India, " Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.

Paperback, 208 pages

Published November 30th 1993 by Vintage (first published 1982)

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Oct 14, 2010 Eric rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: travels

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-pa

...more 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.

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Jun 10, 2010 K.D. Oliveros rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommended to K.D. by: 500 Must Read Books (Memoir)

Shelves: 501, memoirs

What a nice break from reading so many fiction books! This lyrical memoir of Michael Ondaatje is a must read of those who read and did not like his Booker-award winning novel The English Patient. In this book, I agree with Margaret Atwood said that he (Mr. Ondaatje) is at his agile and evocative best. This book is brightly colored, sweet and painful and legend-like. If you still doubt that Mr. Ondaatje is a gifted writer, read this memoir. Reading him here is akin to St. Thomas touching the Holy...more

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Mar 31, 2008 Samuel Breed rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 texture of the foreign lan...more

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Dec 28, 2007 Patrick McCoy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography-autobiography

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 who used...more

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Jul 24, 2007 Sab rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: expat, travelogue, nonfiction

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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Sep 15, 2008 Claudia F. rated it 5 of 5 stars

Dear Mr. Ondaatje,
You've got to stop writing such powerful, sexy books. You make me want to abandon everything and move to Ceylon. I have a terrible problem with mosquitoes. And, frankly, I become rather crazy in the heat. But, ohhhh, how you seduce. Grandmothers dying in floods, the drinking, the dancing, the sheer cliffs, the friendly snakes that might be your father. I want to hang out in the verdant fields with you and your family. I've never before found mine so ordinary.
sigh,
CFM

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Feb 12, 2012 Laura rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Another piece that I was required to read for my advanced nonfiction writing class. It was very different from the others (Maya Angelou and Geoffrey Wolff) in topic, writing style, and flow.

Running in the Family was difficult to read and dive into, at first. The writing style is disjointed and the timeline of the narrative jumbles and hops around. Within each section of chapters, the paragraph could begin with a story about the narrator's grandmother, and end with paddies and riding on trains. H...more

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Sep 18, 2011 Emily rated it 5 of 5 stars

Ondaatje’s travel memoir, Running in the Family is, stylistically, probably one of the most unique pieces of writing I have ever encountered. I would compare it to a scrapbook or a collage. It brings together a medley of different mediums: stories, conversations, photographs, maps, poems, and more. Ondaatje sews these various mediums together beautifully to create a catalog of his family’s history. I envy this creative style and would love to try this sort of medium-mixing myself. I would recomm...more

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Jan 19, 2012 Cat rated it 4 of 5 stars

Very beautifully written. A fractured tale of memory, family, and place, and the struggle to vivify (and perhaps invent) the stories that make you who you are. The descriptions of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) are utterly transporting, and I love that Ondaatje begins with a tale of intoxication as jollity and nostalgia (basically: I got drunk and decided I needed to go back to Ceylon) and that gradually as his book unwinds, it becomes clear that alcoholism is one of the demons that dogs his family and that...more Very beautifully written. A fractured tale of memory, family, and place, and the struggle to vivify (and perhaps invent) the stories that make you who you are. The descriptions of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) are utterly transporting, and I love that Ondaatje begins with a tale of intoxication as jollity and nostalgia (basically: I got drunk and decided I needed to go back to Ceylon) and that gradually as his book unwinds, it becomes clear that alcoholism is one of the demons that dogs his family and that particularly warped the life of his father. Without losing his sense of humor, Ondaatje communicates the darkness in his family's past and his father's habits. He also does a wonderful job stressing the piecing together of narrative and the imagining of narratives. He tells two chapters from his grandmother's point of view and his father's point of view respectively, trying to imagine what it would be like to be inside their skins and experiences. The grandmother's chapter is especially lovely and feels almost magical realist, though nothing patently supernatural happens. Another chapter cobbles together accounts of his father's debauchery from a number of different sources without naming those sources. Thus, in a postmodern way, Ondaatje makes the subject of his book constructing ongoing and necessarily incomplete narratives about the past (rather than recovering a cohesive narrative about the past), which makes the present participle of the title particularly appropriate. My only hesitation about the book is that I felt a bit of amnesia as I moved from chapter to chapter; because of its deliberately shard-like structure, sometimes the components of the narrative got away from me. I don't think this hurt the aesthetic or narrative effect that Ondaatje was going for, but it made me feel like the book was fading from my memory even as I was reading it. (Is it possible that Ondaatje could be going for that level of ephemerality through style and structure? Perhaps an overread/overreach, but I like the idea...)(less)

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Apr 04, 2008 Tawny rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Tawny by: Dr. Keith Lawrence

Shelves: memoir

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."

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Sep 27, 2011 Laura rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: school

Second book for a contemporary fiction course. An interesting blend of poetry & prose and family stories & memories. It took me a while to get into it and for the most part the sense behind the structure eluded me. The poems about the toddy tapper and the cinnamon peeler were great. I liked the meta-fictional moments where he writes about writing itself -- sometimes in Ceylon, sometimes at home again in Canada ("Now, and here, Canadian February, I write this in the kitchen ..."). This bo...more Second book for a contemporary fiction course. An interesting blend of poetry & prose and family stories & memories. It took me a while to get into it and for the most part the sense behind the structure eluded me. The poems about the toddy tapper and the cinnamon peeler were great. I liked the meta-fictional moments where he writes about writing itself -- sometimes in Ceylon, sometimes at home again in Canada ("Now, and here, Canadian February, I write this in the kitchen ..."). This book makes me think about the family stories I've heard (and the ones I haven't, or have heard only part of -- although much less about affairs and feuds and more about embarrassing situations) in a different light -- and makes me appreciate the ways in which my family retells the same stories again and again, often the same but sometimes different, sometimes arguing over who experienced what, because it's one of the few ways to hold on to those memories and to shape and organize our collective history.

"No story is every told just once. Whether a memory or funny hideous scandal, we will return to it an hour later and retell the story with additions and this time a few judgements thrown in. In this way history is organized."

"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. 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."

Post-class notes: So I guess the lack of structural sense is because Ondaatje’s all poststructuralist and stuff, right? (Downside to doing a combined degree -- no room for as much theory as one might need.) So there's a complication of what is identity and how it can be discovered or developed, an erasure of the author from his own memoir, an attempt to draw together fragments of stories and memory and knowledge in order to gain identity that fails in interesting ways, a diasporic narrative, and so on.

The beginning chapter with the "bright bone of a dream" about his father and the black dogs in a tropical landscape is brought back near the end of the book with the chapter "The Bone" where the story of his father and the black dogs is a surreal and unbelievable, told by a friend of his father’s, and is not a dream. So his progression is a from a feverish, dreamy fear of what he sees as the reality of his father at the beginning of the book to an acceptance of what is supernatural and unknowable about his father?(less)

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Nov 11, 2007 Amy rated it 2 of 5 stars

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.

3 likes · like · see review

Nov 06, 2012 Jessica Bebenek rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, non-fiction

Overall, I was kind of disappointed with this book. I think I wanted it to be something it wasn't, however, so that is really my fault.

This book explored memory and the negotiation between 'fiction' and 'non-fiction' very interestingly. It also mingled genres very well--fiction/non-fiction and poetry--which is something I'm also interested in in my own work. So it was great to see it practiced so effectively.

However, I ultimately found this book to be too navel-gazing to really pull me in. It...more

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Dec 10, 2012 Cleo rated it 5 of 5 stars

In the late 1970s, Ondaatje returned to Sri Lanka, his native island. As Ondaatje tells of his journey, he also recalls the history of his Dutch-Ceylonese family, with various vignettes and deeper stories as well. Once again, Ondaatje has woven two things into one: a travel narrative and a family memoir. And once again, his writing is at his best when he writes about Sri Lanka.

A great thing about Running in the Family is the descriptions of Sri Lanka: not only Ondaatje's own, but of various expl...more

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May 17, 2009 Shelah rated it 3 of 5 stars

I'm always curious about authors' lives-- whether they're stable (and boring?) like mine, or turbulent (and exciting?). Based on the Ondaatje novels I've read, The English Patient, Anil's Ghost, Divisadero, and In the Skin of a Lion, I wouldn't have expected Ondaatje to grow up in a cookie-cutter suburb eating tv dinners and watching Donna Reed. And he didn't. Instead he spent the first twelve years of his life with family in Sri Lanka, where his parents both came from the Indo-European gentry.

O...more

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Feb 05, 2013 Barbm1020 rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 12-books-from-12-countries, 2013-challenge, 2013-tour, countries-of-the-world

This book is Michael Ondaatje's memoir of his reunion with his family in his native Sri Lanka, although they all still call it Ceylon. For challenge purposes I'm counting it as a book from Sri Lanka because everything happens there and it's about real people so maybe mostly true, and if that's unclear I recommend you read the book. ;-) It's a collection of family anecdotes about whimsical people who lived on a grand scale for as long as they could and never went out with a whimper. Sometimes fun...more

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Jul 05, 2010 Q rated it 2 of 5 stars

Michael Ondaatje is one if my favorite writers. but this book didn't do it for me. it was the tone of the writing - an angst - disfinctional - disjoint- alcohol like enduced- a narcisitic edge - that didn't resonate for me. and yet being the craftsman Ondaatje is - i know all this was purposeful.

what a family! colorful yes - but not one we really want to come home to. not a lot of nurture. alot of party. and so casting the lens on his roots with the sticky odor of spices in the air ( the scent...more

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Aug 31, 2011 Paige rated it 4 of 5 stars

As an English major I was often asked, when people used to ask me such things, "who is your favorite author?". For many years after I graduated I told people Michael Ondaatje and that my favorite book was The English Patient by him. I first read this memoir by him and I enjoyed the luscious writing style so much that I read more. So this book has been sitting on my shelf for years. I pulled it out again and enjoyed taking time to savor it again.

Another reason to love this book is the chance to v...more

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May 06, 2012 marquie rated it 4 of 5 stars

If it is indeed possible to fall in love with someone because of how beautifully written their prose is, then I am indeed already half in love with Ondaatje.
Although at times, his writing is rather fragmented and so abstract that it seems rather narcotic - he is still utterly brilliant.
In 'Running in The Family', he recalls his ancestry's Dutch-Ceylonese history in Sri Lanka (which he refers to in the memoir as 'Ceylon'.) There are tales of bloodshed, unrequited love, suicides, drunkenness, and...more

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Jun 29, 2009 Janey Bennett rated it 2 of 5 stars

I don't know what to make of this book. It's an account of generations of wild, impetuous, narcissistic people, colonials in an exotic location (Sri Lanka), behaving badly and then destructively, dying, divorcing, drinking, described with a distance, a dissociation, that makes them both part of the "I say, Old Chap" colonial tradition and a heartbreaking journey for a sensitive child of such people. I know why he wrote it: he puts these large characters in a shopcase and can look at them from so...more

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Feb 13, 2013 Debapriya Nag rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 st...more

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Apr 07, 2011 Monica rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

***Some may say that this review contains spoilers but since nothing really happened in this book (wait, was that a "spoiler"?) it is hard to say what a "spoiler" for this book is.

Ok. ok. I get it. Your dad was a drunk. But remember when he did that really funny thing? or not? Remember when he was so kind? or when he wasn't? Remember how intelligent he was? Or that really dumb thing he did? How horrible. How wonderful!

Ok. ok. I get it. Your mom is amazing. Except when she did that not so amazing...more

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Dec 02, 2008 Colleen rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Anyone who is okay with beautiful writing that doesn't really follow a plot

Recommended to Colleen by: Nick

Shelves: nick-s-recommendation

I had read bits of this book in a book of Ondaatje excerpts that Nick gave me for our first Christmas many moons ago. I saw this on his shelf and grabbed it to take to work with me because it was thin, he loves this author, and I was curious to read more. This book has a kind of peaceful mood about it. It definitely does not read like a linear novel, but is rather a collection of stories based on his family's oral tradition, poems, and memories. Sometimes the stories are more amusing than others...more

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Jun 27, 2010 Matthew McCarthy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family is definitely not your typical memoir; Ondaatje writes his return to Sri Lanka in such a way that fact and fiction are blended together so perfectly, coupled with a poetic prose and descriptions of an immaculate landscape. Running in the Family may only be 174 pages, but for such a small book it is bursting with life -- almost making you wish it just a bit longer.

Some people could be a bit turned off by the disjointed nature of the book as it is filled wi...more

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Jun 03, 2012 Jesse Sublett rated it 5 of 5 stars

One of my favorite books by one of the greatest authors. Period. Funny, sad, lyrical. I asked Ondaatje at a reading in Austin, TX if he had thought of the story as a screwball comedy. He laughed nervously and agreed it was like that. I said, Wouldn't it be great as a film, a screwball comedy like His Girl Friday. His tone became more brittle then, and he said he would hate to glorify his father with a film. After the reading I got him to sign some books and mentioned the film idea one more time,...more

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Sep 29, 2010 Sebas rated it 4 of 5 stars

I had always thought of non fiction as something used only to learn. As if it couldn be funny. Then I started reading this book and that changed. Yes, this book is non-fiction, even though it seems fiction at some parts. This book tells the memoirs of a man (Michael Ondaatje, the author) that goes to Sri Lanks, his place of birth, to find out moreabout his parents and his (and their) past.
This was a good book. At some parts I felt like I wasnt sure who was talikng, or who were all those characte...more

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Feb 20, 2013 Sara rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book was so short, by the time I was getting into it, it was over. As always, Ondaatje writes beautifully, like a song, and this is no exception. You could feel the passion and emotion Ondaatje had for the characters, his family members. I especially loved his maternal grandmother, Lalla, and her flower stealing escapades.

The downside, you ask? I found the characters a bit hard to keep straight and the jumping around in time a bit confusing. And, since the storyline didn't seem to be laid...more

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Dec 19, 2012 Gijs rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century, 20th-century-1980s, biography-and-autobiography, canadian-literature, english, sri-lanka, non-fiction, asia

In 'Running in the Family' Ondaatje returns to Sri Lanka, country of his youth, to explore his roots. The result is an original if directionless mix of travelogue, memories, reflections, tall tales, photos and even poetry. Most of the stories are about Ondaatje's eccentric family members, giving a vivid portrait of a colonial upper class, utterly spoiled in the 1930s and 1940s. Special attention goes out to Ondaatje's father, a man as original as he was impossible, and like many other characters...more

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Apr 05, 2011 Susie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

I absolutely love this book. Ondaatje is also a poet, and his prose often veers towards poetry - in a good way. I first read this book 10 years ago, and fell in love with it then. Rereading it recently - older, with a much greater understanding of the difficulties of parent-child relationships - reaffirmed my initial feelings about the book. It's a story of Ondaatje's family in Sri Lanka, mostly about his parents, but really, it's about his relationship (or lack thereof) with his father. Ultimat...more

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Jul 04, 2011 Allyson rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I love this author and The English Patient remains one of my favorite books. A rare book I am able to reread and enjoy as much each time.
This book is very lush and vivid, but odd. He creates a strange sense of his family, almost a dream remembrance and it reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez actually. Magic realism.
I thought i had read this in the past but realized I had not. Interesting but too short and undeveloped for a full picture of his family and Sri Lanka. A glancing glimpse of times, m...more

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About Michael Ondaatje

He was born to a Burgher family of Dutch-Tamil-Sinhalese-Portuguese origin. He moved to England with his mother in 1954. After relocating to Canada in 1962, Ondaatje became a Canadian citizen. Ondaatje studied for a time at Bishops College School and Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Quebec, but moved to Toronto and received his BA from the University of Toronto and his MA from Queen's Universit...more

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Quotes from Running in the Family

“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. ” — 26 people liked it

“all this Beethoven and rain” — 21 people liked it

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