This is Ondaatje's attempt to come to terms with his strange and often tumultuous family history. Ondaatje was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and his grandparents were from rich and aristocratic families, descendants of Europeans who had colonized the island a couple of hundred years earlier. Ondaatje writes of his grandparents, his parents, and his childhood while weaving in incidents from his own homecoming after 25 years away. But the story eventually reveals itself to be focused mostly on Ondaatje's attempt to understand his father, a mostly gentle man who alternated between civility and utter drunkenness. Some of the stories are pretty hilarious--such as the several times his father drunkenly (often nakedly) hijacked trains and had to be picked up by family members at the next stop--but of course the reality of such a childhood is not glossed over; as one of Ondaatje's siblings remarked, "I showed what you had written to someone and they laughed and said what a wonderful childhood we must have had, and I said it was a nightmare." The book, by the way, is not an exhaustively researched family history, but more of a set of memories belonging to Ondaatje and others. Ondaatje conveys the hard-to-grasp nature of his own story by telling it un-chronologically; sometimes you think that the memory is his, but then you realize that it must be someone else's memory being told second-hand, but in such a way that you realize that Ondaatje has probably heard this story so many times that it's almost as though he were actually there (if that makes sense). Ondaatje says it best himself in the acknowledgments: "I must confess that the book is not a history but a portrait or 'gesture.' And if those listed above disapprove of the fictional air I apologize and can only say that in Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts." ( )

Oondaatje's family memoir is a beautiful, evocative mix of poetry and prose, memory and inventiveness.

Although he is based in Canada, Ondaatje masterfully captures the environment of Sri Lanka's cities and estates, and presents a compelling portrait of his eclectic family. Reading this book in the middle of English winter, I found myself suddenly a million miles away, in a land of coconuts and jasmine and secret marriages and drunken military officers holding up night trains.

Even if you don't like memoirs and couldn't care less about Sri Lanka, read this book for the language. His poetry is exquisite, but so is his prose: tender, descriptive, nearly sing-song in places. An absolute must-read. ( )

This is a collection of short stories, a small offering of poems, a few remembrances, some vignettes, a spattering of well juxtaposed historical facts and some black and white photographs. It is the memoir as scrap book, half evolving into a filial overture to a flawed but forgiven father. “Running in the Family” is more atmospheric than linear, more concerned with the rakish and entertaining essence of wealthy Ceylon in the first part of the 20th century than with any of the individuals that drink, dance and screw their way through its pages. Though Ondaatje sets out to “trace the maze of relationships in [his] ancestry,” he does not distress his content with a rigid chronology.

There is little to anchor a reader who passes through Ondaatje’s impressions and learns disconnected facts about lizards, light infantry and railway travel. Unfortunately, the strongest pieces of writing (the “Passions of Lalla” chapter and the accounts of Papa Ondaatje ruining train trips for a whole country) show up the wispiness of the everything else. Once Ondaatje gets momentum with a character description and sinks his teeth into plot (however temporarily), he is at his best and most memorable. The sudden shift away from an engaging character who gets swept from the living or flown out of sight does create a certain wistfulness and sense of loss for the reader, which is in keeping with the overall tone of the memoir. But, it renders the more half-hearted chapters, poems and historical accounts less satisfying. That said, I have an unusually clear sense of what it must have been like to live in Ceylon at the time of the narrative and an unexpected, subtle wish that I actually was living amongst the humans who populate “Running in the Family.”

Ondaatje’s people lived large, enjoyed themselves tremendously and had a wonderful, exotic and sensuous backdrop for their existence. (Though, the failure of any indigenous Ceylonese or persons of low income to appear in this book, does mean that a reader only gets a taste for the narrowest, most stratospheric segment of the population—whose ability to exist in narratives totally devoid of the people who must be picking and cleaning their fruit, making house and fixing everything that breaks is a little off-putting.) ( )

We are taken into the almost extravagantly lived life of the Ondaatje family in Sri Lanka. The prose is as rich as the countryside. We see a family only step away from the colonial English. We suffer through the torrid heat, and we undergo an almost a wild west encounter. We can see how part of Ondaatje novelistic visage was formed from the stories of those around him while growing up and the re=encounter on two return visits. ( )

Simple book, but very beautifully written. ( )