Michael Ondaatje’s “Running in the Family”

One of my favorite memoirs, Michael Ondaatje’s Running in Family, chronicles several generations of the author’s family in Sri Lanka and his own return to Ceylon. Readers tend to love or hate Ondaatje depending on their tolerance for meandering, character-driven plots and how far a few beautiful lines of prose can propel you through a text. And not only does he break the rules of pacing and plot (which I’ve concluded he gets away with because of haunting sentences like, “What started it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold on to”) but he also fictionalizes, fills in scenes; takes liberties with truth.

He somehow gets the reader to accept fiction, lies, in his non-fiction. Maybe, in part, it is because he is a poet and novelist first, but he also reveals the unreliability of family oral history. He shows how every perspective can provide only a limited view of the past and reminds the reader how elusive truth can be.

Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships. There are stories of elopements, unrequited love, family feuds, and exhausting vendettas, which everyone was drawn into, had to be involved with. But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other’s presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character – the way a person took on and recognized in himself he smile of a lover. Individuals are seen only in the context of these swirling social tides. It was almost impossible for a couple to do anything without rumour leaving their shoulders like a flock of messenger pigeons.

Where is the intimate and truthful in all this? Teenager and Uncle. Husband and lover. A lost father in his solace. And why do I want to know of this privacy? After the cups of tea, coffee, public conversations…I want to sit down with someone and talk with utter directness, want to talk to all the lost history like that deserving lover.

And because the reader travels along with Ondaatje from the “brittle air” of Canada to the “blaze of heat” in Sri Lanka, we long for this truth too. We want the intimacy of details that are never recorded, never spoken, and can only be imagined. We go with him. We run in the family. We take train rides, drive down dirt roads, float in flood waters, and walk through sweating jungles. We hope to know the truth even as we accept that it always eludes us.

Maybe that is what is most truthful: to be told we are being lied to so we can accept that only words on a page can capture a certain truth about the past. By creating full scenes and complex characters from the past we can know our ancestors more intimately. They are buried and turned to dust so only in fictionalized memoirs such as Ondaatje’s can we unearth a truth in the distant past.