Running in the Family
Running in the Family
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Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje
'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.
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 *
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 *
Michael Ondaatje is the author of seven novels; a memoir, Running in the Family; a non-fiction book on film, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film; and several books of poetry, including The Cinnamon Peeler and Handwriting. The English Patient received the Booker Prize in 1992 and the Golden Man Booker in 2018, and was made into a film directed by Anthony Minghella. Anil’s Ghost was awarded the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize and the Prix Médicis. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781784877811 |
| ISBN 10 | 1784877816 |
| Title | Running in the Family |
| Author | Michael Ondaatje |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Vintage Publishing |
| Year published | 2022-12-08 |
| Number of pages | 208 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |