After reading this second part of Running in the Family, I was a bit confused because Ondaatje started pulling away from stories from his family's past. Or so I thought at least. The chapters in this section all started out with something seemingly irrelevant but ended up connecting somehow to his family.
An example of this is in the first chapter of the section, Ondaatje starts off talking about a mapin his brother's room which starts off almost meaning nothing but in the last paragraph ends up connecting to the first Ondaatje to live in the area of Ceylon. The chapter "Tongue" does the same. It starts talking about this animal called the kabaragoya. It seems to mean little at first but ends up relating to a myth about it's tongue and how his grandmother believed that myth and made his uncle eat the tongue.
Overall the format of these chapters is quite different from the last section. Whereas the last section Ondaatje would simply go through each chapter directly talking about his ancestors, he now talks in present time at first. Then, he talks about something and how it relates to his ancestors and the past in general.
The other side of the section, was a collection of poems. I'm still not overly sure what they meant or really had to do with the book in general. I'm sure we'll go over it but I just couldn't figure out why they were added. A few of them have a small connection to the Ondaatjes but I'm not really sure.
I look forward to the next section because I want to see what the format is going to be like in that one.
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