(05/20/2008) Running In The Family by Michael Ondaatje. New York. 1982. Norton. keywords: Autobiography Sri Lanka Literature. 207 pages. Jacket design by Antonina Krass. 0393016374. September 1982.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   This book is an absorbing autobiographical journey of discovery to a far place in another time. Through memory, through imagination, the author reveals a world of fabulous characters and landscapes as he finds his own beginnings in the strange context of his family history. Michael Ondaatje was born in Ceylon to a privileged, highly eccentric family of mixed Dutch, Sinhalese, and Tamil ancestry. His parents separated, and he left Ceylon when he was eleven, eventually settling in Canada. Almost twenty-five years later, he returned to sort out the recollected fragments of experience, legend, and family scandal, and to reconstruct the fascinating relationship of his parents set against the exotic background of a colonial empire in decline. Cobras in the garden; grandmother Gratiaen swept away in a flood; the humid silence of the tropical afternoons; his father burying gin bottles in the flower beds; mad, drunken expeditions through the jungle - these are a few of the pieces that the author tries to fit together in order to understand who his parents were and who he is.

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