在家譜中穿行

Title：Running in the Family
Author: Ondaatje, Michael (1943 - )
London : Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd., 1992, c1983
242 p
Read by: 10/22/2012, borrowed from Mel loan
Genre: Memoire
 

I am going on my fourth books of his.

I like this book more than The English Patient. Keep this pocket size book in my handbag everywhere I went: Office, shopping rides, a vacation trip, pit stops… An account of the family drama especially of his father’s, mixed with unconfirmed anecdotes, it is brief, sweet, light humored and elegant. Exactly a memoire should be. Read this: “In the bathroom ants had attacked the novel thrown on the floor by the commode. A whole battalion was carrying one page away from it source, carrying the intimae print as if rolling a tablet away from him. He knelt down on the red tile, slowly, not wishing to disturb their work. It was page 189. He had not got that far in the book yet but he surrendered it to them. He sat down forgetting the mirror he was been moving towards. Scared of the company of the mirror, he sat down with his back against the wall and waited. The white rectangle moved with the busy arduous ants. Duty, he thought. But that was just a fragment gazed at by the bottom of his eye. He drank. There. He saw the midnight rat”. It is funny and sad; I believe this is how the entire book is like. Mike should thank his parents and ancestors for giving him the hand and the eyes for writing, their past drama was running in his blood. Without it, he won’t achieve today.