Michael Ondaatje. Each title in Running in the Family gives the reader insight to what the chapter is about - Monsoon Notebook
Each title in Running in the Family gives the reader insight to what the chapter is about and holds a significant piece to understanding himself. The meanings of the words in the title juxtapose each other. A Monsoon is a tropical storm where it rains for days. A notebook is something that a person writes information down to reorganize their thoughts. The tropical storm denotes a chaotic atmosphere as juxtaposing to a notebook that denotes order. The irony in the title serves to delineate how Michael Ondaatje is exploring the chaotic lives of his family members and tries to reconstruct his past in his return to Ceylon.
The first several words of this chapter are significant as it indicates that this chapter is perhaps a letter written in his notebook. This chapter is a period of reconstructing his family’s past after all the factual information he has received from conversing with the people of Ceylon. “To Jungles and gravestones…” After 25 years living in Canada, where the cold weather seems natural to him, the jungles in Ceylon do not suit his comfort, reaffirming his position as a tourist. The gravestones refer to his dead parents and relatives. He speaks of how difficult it is to piece information from history and compares it to the delicacy of wet newspapers. Ondaatje paints a picture of Ceylon from a perspective of a tourist where the exotic environment awes him. He finds it bizarre that “nobody wears socks” and “bullocks hold up traffic”. His description of Ceylon is written in long run on sentences, similar to how a video clip of images transitioning from one to another. Water imagery plays a predominant role in his description of Ceylon, as it illustrates his attempt to seam a flowing line through a labyrinth of historical information.
