Running in the Family Paperback - 1993

From the jacket flap

In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India," Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.

Media 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.”
–The 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

“It sparkles with the intensity and vividness of its multifaceted tales of romance and intrigue.”
–Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“A brilliant, charming, poetic, hyperbolic holiday of a book.…Ondaatje walks the line between fact and fiction with a delicately rendered delight.”
–Vancouver Province

“…the brilliant and moving book he has written is original in every way that matters.”
–W. S. Merwin

“A beautiful, luscious book of discovery and remembrance.”
–Hamilton Spectator

“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

“It dazzles with its range of imagination, richness of language and the consistently involving changes of mood and tempo.”
–Toronto Star

“This is an intriguing, funny, dream-like book, impossible to put down.”
–Winnipeg Free Press

“…brief, vivid scenes, moments revived out of remote memories, pictures of the intensities lived by his passionate parents… amid the lush flora, the predatory fauna, and the old-fashioned life of the British colonies. This is great story-telling.…"
–Leon Edel


From the Hardcover edition.

Citations

• Booklist, 09/01/1993, Page 11
• Library Journal, 01/01/1994, Page 116