Running in the Family

Second book for a contemporary fiction course. An interesting blend of poetry & prose and family stories & memories. It took me a while to get into it and for the most part the sense behind the structure eluded me. The poems about the toddy tapper and the cinnamon peeler were great. I liked the meta-fictional moments where he writes about writing itself – sometimes in Ceylon, sometimes at home again in Canada (“Now, and here, Canadian February, I write this in the kitchen ...”). This book makes me think about the family stories I've heard (and the ones I haven't, or have heard only part of – although much less about affairs and feuds and more about embarrassing situations) in a different light – and makes me appreciate the ways in which my family retells the same stories again and again, often the same but sometimes different, sometimes arguing over who experienced what, because it's one of the few ways to hold on to those memories and to shape and organize our collective history.

“No story is every told just once. Whether a memory or funny hideous scandal, we will return to it an hour later and retell the story with additions and this time a few judgements thrown in. In this way history is organized.”

“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 the smile of a lover.”

Post-class notes: So I guess the lack of structural sense is because Ondaatje‰ЫЄs all poststructuralist and stuff, right? (Downside to doing a combined degree – no room for as much theory as one might need.) So there's a complication of what is identity and how it can be discovered or developed, an erasure of the author from his own memoir, an attempt to draw together fragments of stories and memory and knowledge in order to gain identity that fails in interesting ways, a diasporic narrative, and so on.

The beginning chapter with the “bright bone of a dream” about his father and the black dogs in a tropical landscape is brought back near the end of the book with the chapter “The Bone” where the story of his father and the black dogs is a surreal and unbelievable, told by a friend of his father‰ЫЄs, and is not a dream. So his progression is a from a feverish, dreamy fear of what he sees as the reality of his father at the beginning of the book to an acceptance of what is supernatural and unknowable about his father?