Title: Running in the FamilyAuthor: Michael Ondaatje
I'm always curious about authors' lives-- whether they're stable (and boring?) like mine, or turbulent (and exciting?). Based on the Ondaatje novels I've read, The English Patient, Anil's Ghost, Divisadero, and In the Skin of a Lion, I wouldn't have expected Ondaatje to grow up in a cookie-cutter suburb eating tv dinners and watching Donna Reed. And he didn't. Instead he spent the first twelve years of his life with family in Sri Lanka, where his parents both came from the Indo-European gentry.
Ondaatje's love for both his homeland and his family (crazy as they may be) oozes from Running in the Family. He tells colorful family stories, writes about his father's struggles with alcoholism, and about the antics of various extended family members. I've never read Ondaatje's poetry, but this book informs his fiction and introduced me to his poems.
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