Books Running in the Family Free Download

Particularize Out Of Books Running in the Family

Title	:	Running in the Family
Author	:	Michael Ondaatje
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 208 pages
Published	:	November 30th 1993 by Vintage (first published 1982)
Categories	:	Autobiography. Memoir. Nonfiction. Biography. Travel

Running in the Family

Michael Ondaatje

Paperback | Pages: 208 pages

Rating: 3.84 | 7473 Users | 648 Reviews

Ilustration Concering Books Running in the Family

This book is hard to categorize as it is part family memoir, part travelogue and part autobiography. There’s even a section of poetry. Ondaatje, best known for his novel, The English Patient, was born in Ceylon, the island off southern India, now Sri Lanka. His ancestry was a mix of native Sinhalese and Dutch, but the European part predominated since they were a member of the small minority of Christians on the island and certainly upper class.



Sri Lanka is about the size of West Virginia, so his travels took him to every corner of the island. I appreciate the map included that showed most of the places mentioned in the story. We hear some about famous authors who lived there for a while such as D. H Lawrence and Pablo Neruda. And we get a bit about the country’s history such as the revolt of young people in 1971 when as many as 4,000 were killed.



To show how upper crust the extended family was, they all had servants and nannies. They left Colombo seasonally in a caravan of cars to avoid the heat and go to the hill towns where they created a resort atmosphere, racing horses and swimming, playing golf, tennis and croquet. English and other Europeans were disliked as colonial masters unless they married locals in which case they were fully accepted into the local society.

In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to the island for several months to have his family meet his relatives and to catch up on his own family history. His mother had separated from his father when the author was as an infant. He left the island in 1954, when he was eleven, to move to England with his mother. So to some extent the author is writing about events he never really witnessed. And what a wild family it was.

Two people stand out for their crazy antics: his father and an aunt, a sister of his mother. Let’s just look at his father: a kind man that they loved, but he was at times a raging alcoholic. Technically he suffered from dipsomania, a condition where he could go for a few months without any alcohol but then go on a binge and drink multiple bottles of gin in a day for weeks at a time. He had been a director of tea plantation and later a major in the Ceylon army. In one of his bouts of blind alcoholism he took his army issue gun and commandeered a train, going about naked. His influential friends helped cover things up. Family memoir spills over into family legends, and some of his antics and those of an aunt seem a stretch to believe.



Another major theme of the book, I’ll call homage to the tropics. Perhaps because the author was visiting his homeland from Canada, he is re-enamored of the heat, rain on metal roofs, bats and peacocks coming into houses, the riot of flowers and plant tendrils reaching into the windows. This lush tropical exoticism makes think of another book I reviewed, Tale of a Certain Orient by Milton Hatoum, set in Brazil.



And there’s humor. “So how did your grandmother die?” “Natural causes.” “What?” “Floods.”
“My father continued with his technique of trying to solve one problem by creating another.”
“He was my father’s and Noel’s closest friend and the best man at several weddings he tried to spoil.”



After England Ondaatje went to college in Canada and eventually became a Canadian citizen. He has written about a dozen other books which, beside The English Patient, include The Cat’s Table, Warlight and Anil’s Ghost.

Top photo: Sri Lanka landscape from ak8.picdn.net/shutterstock
Pettah Market in Colombo from shutterstock
Colombo skyline from cdn2./media/1075/colombo-sri-lanka
Map of Sri Lanka from ezilon.com/maps
The author from irishtimes.com

Identify Books In Pursuance Of Running in the Family

Original Title:	Running in the Family
Edition Language:	English

Rating Out Of Books Running in the Family

Ratings: 3.84 From 7473 Users | 648 Reviews

Discuss Out Of Books Running in the Family

I wanted to touch them into words. *How I have used them. They knit the story together, each memory a wild thread in the sarong.*During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed. So our job becomes to keep peace with enemy camps, eliminate the chaos at the end of Jacobean tragedies, and with the mercy of distance write the histories.

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

Wonderful memoir and family history in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) where the talented author and poet grew up until age 11, when he moved to Toronto in 1962. The family had Dutch colonial roots from the 17th century, with a blending with Tamil and Sinhalese over the centuries. The narrative is a lovely blend of evocation of Michael's young life on a tea plantation and a reconstruction of the history and experiences of his grandparents and parents from the 1920's. The life was mostly that of the

***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

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

This book is hard to categorize as it is part family memoir, part travelogue and part autobiography. Theres even a section of poetry. Ondaatje, best known for his novel, The English Patient, was born in Ceylon, the island off southern India, now Sri Lanka. His ancestry was a mix of native Sinhalese and Dutch, but the European part predominated since they were a member of the small minority of Christians on the island and certainly upper class. Sri Lanka is about the size of West Virginia, so his

Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships.This is a fragmented and haunted account of the author's family, an account which goes back to Sri Lanka--where the author hadn't lived since the age of eleven. This work easily could have been twice as long. It is perilous work sifting through the details of one's family. I suppose it isn't as traumatic when one grows up being made aware of the stress fractures and the splintered remains. Much is made