Tab Article

Ratings: ★★★★★ (4.7/5)
Genre: Memoir, Travel Literature, Literary Fiction, Family Saga

Book Review:
Michael Ondaatje is best known for ''The English Patient,'' his Booker Prize-winning novel of love and war. But ''Running in the Family'' reveals another side of his talent—a lyrical, witty, and deeply personal memoir that is every bit as powerful as his fiction.

The book chronicles Ondaatje's return to Sri Lanka, the island of his birth, in the late 1970s. He's been away for decades, living in Canada, and the journey is both a physical return and an exploration of memory, family, and identity.

Sri Lanka comes alive in Ondaatje's prose. He captures the ''druglike heat'' and ''intoxicating fragrances'' of the island, its lush landscapes, its chaotic beauty. The Washington Post Book World praises his ''prose style equal to the voluptuousness of [its] subject.'' It's an apt description. Ondaatje writes with a sensuousness that makes the reader feel the heat, smell the spices, see the colors.

But the book is also a family memoir. Ondaatje's family is a cast of characters straight out of fiction: his father, Mervyn, a charming and destructive alcoholic; his mother, Doris, who left when he was young; his grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, all pursuing ''lives of Baudelairean excess with impeccable decorum.'' The stories they tell—of broken engagements, drunken suicide attempts, parties in the jungle, scandals and secrets—are both hilarious and heartbreaking.

Ondaatje structures the book as a series of fragments: memories, stories, poems, lists, photographs. It's not a linear narrative but a collage, a mosaic. This form mirrors the nature of memory itself—fragmented, subjective, always shifting. It also captures the way family stories are passed down: not as a single coherent narrative, but as a collection of anecdotes, each teller adding their own spin.

The critical response has been extraordinary. Margaret Atwood writes: ''Michael Ondaatje is here at his agile and evocative best... Brightly colored, sweet and painful, bloody-minded and otherworldly, [this book] achieves the status of legend.'' Maxine Hong Kingston calls it ''a beautiful, luscious book... the reader who travels with Ondaatje enters a truly magical world.''

''Running in the Family'' is essential reading for anyone interested in Ondaatje, in Sri Lanka, or in the possibilities of memoir as an art form. It's a book that will make you laugh, make you cry, and make you fall in love with its world. Highly recommended.