Running in the Family

(Paperback)

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Michael Ondaatje's remarkable masterpiece of a family memoir, reissued to mark 40 years since its first publication 'During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed... I think all of our lives have been terribly shaped by what went on before us.' Twenty-five years after leaving his native Sri Lanka for the cool winters of Ontario, a chaotic dream of tropical heat and barking dogs pushes Michael Ondaatje to travel back home and revisit a childhood and a family he never fully understood. Along with his siblings and children, Ondaatje gathers rumours, anecdotes, poems, records and memories to piece together this fragmented portrayal of his family's past, his father's destructive alcoholism and the colourful stories and secrets of ancestors both disgraced and adored throughout centuries of Sri Lankan society. In an exotic, evocative portrait of the heat, wildlife, sounds and silences of the Sri Lankan landscape, Ondaatje combines vivid recreations of a privileged, eccentric older generation with a deeply personal reconciliatory journey in which he explores his own ghosts, and how his family's extraordinary history continues to influence his life.

Reviews

Brightly coloured, sweet and painful, bloody-minded and otherworldly, [this book] achieves the status of legend -- Margaret Atwood
Eloquent, oblique, witty, full of light and feeling....Ondaatje's knowledge of the fragility and luck of life is very clear. So, too, is the grace and originality of his prose * New Yorker *
Ondaatje has produced a remarkable book....Shimmering through the haze of heat and memory is an impressionistic, sometimes surreal portrait of an exotic time and place now gone, a colonial paradise that had its own rhythms and imperatives * Globe and Mail *
A beautiful, luscious book. Michael Ondaatje has depicted his extraordinary family, who delighted in masks and costumes and love affairs that 'rainbowed over marriages' in the kind of language that makes glory of their lives. He has gone on a poet's journey to Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and the reader who travels with him enters a truly magical world -- Maxine Hong Kingston
With a prose style equal to the voluptuousness of [Ondaatje's] subject and a sense of humor never too far away, Running in the Family is sheer reading pleasure * Washington Post *

Author Bio

Michael Ondaatje is the author of several novels, as well as a memoir, a nonfiction book on film, and several books of poetry. Among his many Canadian and international recognitions, his novel The English Patient won the 1992 Man Booker Prize, was adapted into a multi-award winning Oscar movie, and was awarded the Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018; Anil's Ghost won the Giller Prize, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and the Prix Medicis; and Warlight was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto.