In these quotations, two brothers – Michael and Christopher Ondaatje – locate one another in their respective travel narratives about Sri Lanka. The passage from Running in the Family (1982) foregrounds a dialogue about the success and failure of travel writing: Christopher's comment that the narrative needs to be told ‘right’ is followed by Michael's reply that the account can never be ‘complete’ and that the material will always be, in some sense, beyond representation. Conversely, in the passage from The Man-Eater of Punanai (1992), Christopher attempts to impose closure on the dialogue: he utters the last word by pronouncing that Michael ‘got it right’, even if he did stretch the truth through exaggeration. This intertextual exchange is, we suggest, synecdochic of the two writers' diverse approaches to contemporary travel writing. Michael looks for ‘clues’, whereas Christopher seeks out ‘facts’; Michael is content with ‘incompleteness’, whereas Christopher is only satisfied with the ‘truth’.