Each new book by Michael Ondaatje seems wholly different from those that preceded it, and wholly the same. [Running in the Family] is a family reminiscence…. A far cry, I thought when I began it, from a cycle of poems about Billy the Kid, or a prose poem on the New Orleans jazz scene and cornetist Buddy Bolden. Not so far a cry, it turns out.
But how does it seem different? First, it has the flavour of autobiography. Of course the narrative "I" is always present in Ondaatje's work. The little kid in the cowboy clothes at the end of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is the author. And the narrator of Coming Through Slaughter enters the work at various points with a similar kind of identification: "When [Buddy Bolden] went mad he was the same age as I am now." But in Running in the Family the identification appears to be more direct. The characters in this book are the author's real family: his father, Mervyn, his grandmother, Lalla, and the rest. Autobiography, in other words, is not simply a motif here, but a part of the narrative surface as well.
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