Running in the Family - Hardcover

Ondaatje, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0771068840 ISBN 13: 9780771068843

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 1982

Synopsis

Running in the Family is a fictionalized memoir, written in post-modern style involving aspects of magic realism, by Michael Ondaatje. It deals with his return to his native island of Sri Lanka, also called Ceylon, in the late 1970s. It also deals with his family. Much of the focus falls on his father Mervyn Ondaatje and his scandalous drunken antics. Michael's grandmother Lalla is another family member that is explored in detail. Many themes are explored in the lives of his family, particularly luxurious frivolity (especially in the 1920s) and dipsomania. The book often seems to blur the lines of fiction and history by offering diverse accounts of certain incidents and re tellings of isolated events about which the author couldn't logically know so many intimate details. It is ultimately about a man's quest to reconcile himself with the father he scarcely knew and come to terms with the loss of not knowing that man. This narrative which locates the writer and his journey towards a father, who is no longer alive, but constantly present in the narrative, is also a story of individual identity and its intersections with a larger identity of a minority community in the country. Some important themes include: memory (its reliability, importance, and what makes it valuable), assumptions about others, the importance of family, and societal expectations. Another significant extension of the theme of memory is the blurred line between memory and history. History becomes anecdote, the past that is remembered: recollected and recounted, a negotiation with memory and its unreliability. This book also contains many motifs including maps, nature and money. Motifs also include the sensorial dynamics of memory: sounds, smells and colours.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

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Read by Michael Ondaatje

"Michael Ondaatje is here at his agile and evocative best . . . Brightly colored, sweet and painful, bloody-midned and otherworldly, [Running in the Family] achieves the status of legend."
-Margaret Atwood

In the late 1970s, Michael Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka.  Recording his journey through he druglike heat and intoxicating fragrances of the "pendant off the ear of India", Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family.  It is a story of broken engagements and drunken suicide attempts, of parties where exquisitely dressed couples tango in the jungle, a tale whose actors pursue lives of Baudelairean excess with impeccable decorum.

Lyrical and witty, tragic and deliriously romantic, Running in the family is an inspired marriage of travel narrative and  family memoir by one of our most eloquent and poetic writers.

About the Author:

MICHAEL ONDAATJE is the author of six novels, a memoir, a nonfiction book on film, and several books of poetry. The English Patient won the Booker Prize; Anil’s Ghost won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Prix Médicis. Born in Sri Lanka, Ondaatje now lives in Toronto.

About this edition

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
• Publication date: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0771068840
• ISBN 13: 9780771068843
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 207