Running in the Family

When I started reading this book, a few things caught me off guard; the chapters are only a few pages long each, a half a page of italicized writing introduced the book, and it started on page 17. After reading the first few chapters though, I got a few different thoughts.

Ondaatje has a very unique writing style, at least compared to the reading that we have done as a class this quarter. Instead of using a lot of descriptive language that we've now become used to, his writing can be very simple and straight forward most of the time. At other times he tends to use some form of imagery that almost seems ridiculous.

An example of this comes early on in the second chapter when Ondaatje is describing the size of the doors in the house. He writes, "The doors are twenty feet high, as if awaiting the day when a family of acrobats will walk from room to room, sideways, without dismantling themselves from each other's shoulders" (p. 24). It seems like a very random metaphor to use just to simply describe the size of the doors in a house.

I find it interesting that he uses such short chapters to get information across. Instead of taking his time talking about every event around his and at this point his grandparent's lives, he uses shorter, straightforward sentences to get the point across right away. Sometimes he doesn't even tell the story. In the chapter "April 11, 1932," the entire chapter is a quote of someone who was around at the time telling the story. I think he mainly does this because he himself wasn't alive yet so he wants the story to be told by someone who was.

He also talks a lot of his family's alcoholism in these few chapters. Not all of it is in the same mood as the rest. A small amount of the time, he considers it good. In the very beginning, it's while he's drunk that he decides to go back to Asia. Later on however, he talks about his father's alcoholism, and how he would have to hide his alcohol everywhere, so his family could not destroy it.

I'm ready to get further into this book, as it is still in the developing stage. This seems like a good book and I want to see what exactly is going to happen in the coming chapters.