Michael Ondaatje - Running in the Family

Copyright 1982 by Michael Ondaatje

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Ondaatje, Michael, 1943
Running in the family

eISBN: 978-0-307-77664-8

1. Ondaatje, Michael, 1943 . 2. Poets, Canadian (English)
20th century Biography.* 3. Sri Lanka Biography. I. Title.

PS8529.N283Z53 2001 C811.54 COO-933312-6
PR9199.3.O5Z47 2001

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN

EMBLEM EDITIONS
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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 [Ondaatjes] 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

PROSE
Coming through Slaughter 1976
Running in the Family (memoir) 1982
In the Skin of a Lion 1987
The English Patient 1992
Anils Ghost 2000
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film 2002

POETRY
The Dainty Monsters 1967
The Man with 7 Toes 1969
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid 1970
Rat Jelly 1973
Elimination Dance 1976
Theres a Trick with a Knife Im Learning to Do 1979
Tin Roof 1982
Secular Love 1984
The Cinnamon Peeler (selected poems) 1992
Handwriting 1998

ANTHOLOGIES
The Long Poem Anthology 1967
From Ink Lake: Canadian Stories 1991
Lost Classics 2000

For Griffin and Quintin.
For Gillian, Janet, and Christopher.

I saw in this island fowls as big as our country geese having two heads and other miraculous things which I will not here write of.

Oderic (Franciscan Friar, 14th century)

The Americans were able to put a man on the moon because they knew English. The Sinhalese and Tamils whose knowledge of English was poor, thought that the earth was flat.

Douglas Amarasekera, Ceylon Sunday Times 29.1.78

Drought since December.

All across the city men roll carts with ice clothed in sawdust. Later on, during a fever, the drought still continuing, his nightmare is that thorn trees in the garden send their hard roots underground towards the house climbing through windows so they can drink sweat off his body, steal the last of the saliva off his tongue.

He snaps on the electricity just before daybreak. For twenty five years he has not lived in this country, though up to the age of eleven he slept in rooms like thiswith no curtains, just delicate bars across the windows so no one could break in. And the floors of red cement polished smooth, cool against bare feet.

Dawn through a garden. Clarity to leaves, fruit, the dark yellow of the King Coconut. This delicate light is allowed only a brief moment of the day. In ten minutes the garden will lie in a blaze of heat, frantic with noise and butterflies.

Half a pageand the morning is already ancient.

What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto. I was sleeping at a friends house. I saw my father, chaotic, surrounded by dogs, and all of them were screaming and barking into the tropical landscape. The noises woke me. I sat up on the uncomfortable sofa and I was in a jungle, hot, sweating. Street lights bounced off the snow and into the room through the hanging vines and ferns at my friends window. A fish tank glowed in the corner. I had been weeping and my shoulders and face were exhausted. I wound the quilt around myself, leaned back against the head of the sofa, and sat there for most of the night. Tense, not wanting to move as the heat gradually left me, as the sweat evaporated and I became conscious again of brittle air outside the windows searing and howling through the streets and over the frozen cars hunched like sheep all the way down towards Lake Ontario. It was a new winter and I was already dreaming of Asia.