Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje is perhaps the main character in the book. He is also its author. Ondaatje is a well-known novelist and poet who currently lived in Canada. He is best known for writing The English Patient, but Running in the Family is a partly fictionalized memoir of his life growing up in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and his family members who lived there.

The book is compiled from records Ondaatje collected and memories from his youth revived during two trips to Sri Lanka later in his life, one in 1978 and the other in 1980. He deliberately cobbled together these stories in a non-chronological often stream-of-consciousness style in order to paint a "portrait" or make a "gesture" towards the reality of his family life and the depth of the themes he wanted to explore.

For the large majority of the book, Michael is a young boy; since he left...