Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35938 in Books
• Published on: 1984-05-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 207 pages

Review
"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 itsrange 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

Customer Reviews

A beautiful book exhuming a bygone era...
This is wonderful to read. Ondaatje manages to recreate Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in a wonderfully absorbing, highly readable style. The characters (his family!) are extremely eccentric and entertaining, though there is sadness as well as humour. He is a top-notch story teller and this kind of travelogue/biography is a joy to read.

fiction, family history, fairy tale or autobiography
Ondaatje's prose is luminous and his poetry makes Sri Lanka a tangible presence. This is a family history of sorts with a fluctuating narrative standpoint - at times autobiographical, at times a vivid recreation of his parents' experiences and those of other family members. The story of his improbably named grandmother and the groper on the bus had me laughing out loud. This is a fascinating jewel of a book which reads like fiction - not the sort of fiction you buy in an airport book shop, though; rather the sort of fiction likely to be praised on late night book reviews. It is a delight.

Exquisite prose interlaced with vividly beautiful poetry.
A fascinating insight into a time and place I knew nothing about. Ondaatje writes like a dream; not only is his style luminous and sensual but the stories themselves are a sheer delight. Like my fellow Londoner, I loved the story of Lala on the bus - but even more I loved the photograph of the author's parents. Certainly one of my favourite books. Highly recommended (although admittedly not to everyone's taste - if you prefer Jeffrey Archer to Jane Austen you may be disappointed).