Inverness reader Barbara Heenan reminded me of another brilliant memoir among her top 10 favorites, along with Nabokov’s “Speak Memory.” This one is by Michael Ondaatje, cleverly titled “Running in the Family.” The book is composed of remembrances of two return visits to Sri Lanka, in 1978 and 1980. Sri Lanka, also called Ceylon, was the place of Ondaatje’s birth and where he grew up.
This memoir is a series of very short essays, some just a page long and some made up only of a poem, and of headlines of the news of the day: “‘Lindberg’s Baby Found—A Corpse!’ Fred Astaire’s sister, Adele, got married and the 13th president of the French Republic was shot to death by a Russian,” and so on. Some are a series of brilliant, funny, touching anecdotes, some are written as journal entries. One chapter consists of a couple of pages of disconnected dialogue among friends and family members.
In the acknowledgments, Ondaatje admits, “I must confess that the book is not a history but a portrait or ‘gesture.’ And if those listed…disapprove of the fictional air I apologize and can only say that in Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.”
Describing the old governor’s home in Jaffna, where his family is living, he writes:
“For a while we sat in one of the bedrooms sprawled on two beds and a chair. The twin to this bedroom, in another part of the house, is dark and supposedly haunted. Walking into that room’s dampness, I saw the mosquito nets stranded in the air like the dresses of hanged brides, the skeletons of beds without their mattresses, and retreated from the room without ever turning my back on it.”
Along with writing that allows readers to see as well as feel the character of a place and of people, Ondaatje writes about his extraordinary family, especially his grandmother, Lalla: “Her figure at the races is ingrained in several people’s memories: a large hat at a rakish angle that she wore with no consideration for anyone behind her, one hand on her hip, one hand on her hat, and a blue jacaranda blossom pinned on the shoulder of her dusty black dress.”
But his father is by far the most remarkable and tragic of all—a dipsomaniac who, when he was drinking, was liable to throw off all his clothes, brandish a pistol, and stop trains, and who buried dozens of bottles of gin on the family’s property so he wouldn’t run out.
Sri Lanka is hot.
“[In April] the most comfortable hours are from 4 A.M. until about nine in the morning; the rest of the day heat walks the house as an animal hugging everybody… Most of the events in the erotic literature of Asia, one suspects, must take place in the mountains, for sex is almost impossible in Colombo except in the early morning hours, and few have been conceived during this month for the last hundred years.“
Alongside the exquisite writing are mythic animals, among them snakes, bats, and birds, as you’d expect, all of which find a way into the house. There is also the unexpected: the kabaragoya (“from the back it looks like a crocodile. It is about eight feet long. The snout however is blunt, not pointed, as if a crocodile’s nose has been chopped off and the sharp edges worn smooth by tides”) and the thalagoya, described as “a cross between an iguana and a giant lizard.” Snakes were met with gunshot: “My father or my stepmother would blast away not caring what was in the background, a wall, good ebony, a sofa, or a decanter. They killed at least thirty snakes between them.”
Ondaatje came to Point Reyes Books for an interview many years ago. I can’t remember whom he spoke with, but I remember thinking he was awfully aloof—and maybe he was. But all is forgiven. “Running in the Family” is warm and full of humor and love for family and the country he came from. I think I will have to read “The English Patient” next.
Doris Ober is the former managing editor of “The West Marin Review,” the author of “The Dogtown Chronicles” and “The Alzheimer Years,” and an avid reader. She lives in Point Reyes Station.