A Book Review

 

Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje

A friend of mine in Canada mentioned reading this book and I checked out a copy from the library.  The author lives in Canada, but, he was born in Sri Lanka when it was still called Ceylon and left the country as a young boy.  But he made two trips back to Sri Lanka as an adult to find out more about his family, especially his father, who, by all accounts, was a very colorful character.  

I enjoyed reading this book,  Partly because I knew all the places he mentioned, not just Colombo, which is the capital, but, also Kandy, Nuwara Eliya, Kegalle, and Jaffna.  They were all places I had been in while growing up in Sri Lanka and I had memories of those places.  And partly because I knew people with the same last names as the people he mentioned; maybe not the actual individual that was mentioned, but, I knew people with the same surnames.  

And then, he mentioned someone whom I actually knew!  A former statesman who had known the author's father very well as they worked together.  Not only did I know this person as a former statesman, he was also distantly related to my father and a very good friend of my stepfather's!  The author described going to breakfast with his sister at this gentleman's home on one of  his visits to Sri Lanka, and it was something I had done, as a pre-teen and a teenager with my stepfather and my mother!  When the author described the pre-breakfast ritual of feeding the animals in the menagerie on the grounds of this former statesman's home, I remembered doing the same!  There were deer and at least two, maybe three, elephants, during my visits, plus peacocks and geese.  I don't remember what other animals there were, other than squirrels that seemed to have the run of the house.

For the most part, this was a book about family anecdotes and recollections of the author's grandparents and parents as he tried to learn more about who his father was.  But, we all have our own family anecdotes, don't we?  I used to love it when my Aunt D (mother's older sister) used to visit us and they would talk about their childhood and various family members and the things they used to do.  How my maternal grandmother, as the eldest of 14 children, drew water from the well to bathe her younger siblings, how one uncle used to come home drunk and set his children on top of the almirah (a free standing wardrobe), how my mother won a rickshaw in a raffle at school after making up a long story about why she needed the money to buy the raffle ticket (she had to come clean once she won the raffle), etc.  I think that is something we all have in common, no matter where our families originated, no matter where we currently live - old family stories which tend to be forgotten as the older generations pass away.  

I really did enjoy reading this book and now I want to read a more famous book he had written, earlier.