Overview

2 cassettes / 3 hoursRead by Michael Ondaatje Michael Ondaatje is here at his agile and evocative best . . . Brightly colored, sweet and painful, bloody-midned and otherworldly, [Running in the Family] achieves the status of legend .-Margaret AtwoodIn the late 1970s, Michael Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. Recording his journey through he druglike heat and intoxicating fragrances of the pendant off the ear of India , Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. It is a story of broken engagements and drunken suicide attempts, of parties where exquisitely dressed couples tango in the jungle, a tale whose actors pursue lives of Baudelairean excess with impeccable decorum.Lyrical and witty, tragic and deliriously romantic, Running in the family is an inspired marriage of travel narrative and family memoir by one of our most eloquent and poetic writers.

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9780786170432

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Brightly coloured, sweet and painful, bloody-minded and otherworldly, [this book] achieves the status of legend. <br>-Margaret Atwood <br> Eloquent, oblique, witty, full of light and feeling....Ondaatje's knowledge of the fragility and luck of life is very clear. So, too, is the grace and originality of his prose. <br>- The New Yorker <br> Ondaatje has produced a remarkable book....Shimmering through the haze of heat and memory is an impressionistic, sometimes surreal portrait of an exotic time and place now gone, a colonial paradise that had its own rhythms and imperatives. <br>- Globe and Mail <br> A beautiful, luscious book. Michael Ondaatje has depicted his extraordinary family, who delighted in masks and costumes and love affairs that 'rainbowed over marriages' in the kind of language that makes glory of their lives. He has gone on a poet's journey to Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and the reader who travels with him enters a truly magical world. <br>-Maxine Hong Kingston <br> It sparkles with the intensity and vividness of its multifaceted tales of romance and intrigue. <br>- Fort Worth Star-Telegram <br> A brilliant, charming, poetic, hyperbolic holiday of a book....Ondaatje walks the line between fact and fiction with a delicately rendered delight. <br>- Vancouver Province <br>... the brilliant and moving book he has written is original in every way that matters. <br>-W. S. Merwin <br> A beautiful, luscious book of discovery and remembrance. <br>- Hamilton Spectator <br> With a prose style equal to the voluptuousness of [Ondaatje's] subject and a sense of humor never too far away, Running in the Family is sheer reading pleasure. <br>- Washington Post <br> It dazzles with its rangeof imagination, richness of language and the consistently involving changes of mood and tempo. <br>- Toronto Star <br> This is an intriguing, funny, dream-like book, impossible to put down. <br>- Winnipeg Free Press <br>... 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.... <br>-Leon Edel <p> From the Hardcover edition.

Brightly coloured, sweet and painful, bloody-minded and otherworldly, [this book] achieves the status of legend. -Margaret Atwood Eloquent, oblique, witty, full of light and feeling....Ondaatje's knowledge of the fragility and luck of life is very clear. So, too, is the grace and originality of his prose. - The New Yorker Ondaatje has produced a remarkable book....Shimmering through the haze of heat and memory is an impressionistic, sometimes surreal portrait of an exotic time and place now gone, a colonial paradise that had its own rhythms and imperatives. - Globe and Mail A beautiful, luscious book. Michael Ondaatje has depicted his extraordinary family, who delighted in masks and costumes and love affairs that 'rainbowed over marriages' in the kind of language that makes glory of their lives. He has gone on a poet's journey to Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and the reader who travels with him enters a truly magical world. -Maxine Hong Kingston 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 [Ondaatje's] subject and a sense of humor never too far away, Running in the Family is sheer reading pleasure. - Washington Post It dazzles with its rangeof 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 From the Hardcover edition.

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