Divisadero (Vintage International) | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Ondaatje
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  62 reviews
Sales Rank: 1474
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0307279324
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780307279323
ASIN: 0307279324
Publication Date: April 22, 2008
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Amazon.com
From the celebrated author of The English Patient, comes another breathtaking, unforgettable story, this time about a family torn apart by an act of violence. Divisadero is a rich and rewarding read, one that Jhumpa Lahiri, in her guest review for Amazon.com (see below), calls "Ondaatje's finest novel to date." --Daphne Durham
Guest Reviewer: Jhumpa Lahiri
 Jhumpa Lahiri was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, as well as the PEN/Hemingway Award for her mesmerizing debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies. Her poignant and powerful debut novel, The Namesake was adapted by screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, and released in theaters in 2007.
My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje. I began Divisadero as soon as it came into my possession and over the course of a few evenings was captivated by Ondaatje's finest novel to date. The story is simple, almost mythical, stemming from a family on a California farm that is ruptured just as it is about to begin. Two daughters, Anna and Claire, are raised not just as siblings but with the intense bond of twins, interchangeable, inseparable. Coop, a boy from a neighboring farm, is folded into the girls' lives as a hired hand and quasi-brother. Anna, Claire, and Coop form a triangle that is intimate and interdependent, a triangle that brutally explodes less than thirty pages into the book. We are left with a handful of glass, both narratively and thematically. But Divisadero is a deeply ordered, full-bodied work, and the fragmented characters, severed from their shared past, persevere in relation to one another, illuminating both what it means to belong to a family and what it means to be alone in the world. The notion of twins, of one becoming two, pervades the novel, and so the farm in California is mirrored by a farm in France, the setting for another plot line in the second half of the book and giving us, in a sense, two novels in one. But the stories are not only connected but calibrated by Ondaatje to reveal a haunting pattern of parallels, echoes, and reflections across time and place. Like Nabokov, another master of twinning, Ondaatje's method is deliberate but discreet, and it was only in rereading this beautiful book--which I wanted to do as soon as I finished it--that the intricate play of doubles was revealed. Every sign of the author's genius is here: the searing imagery, the incandescent writing, the calm probing of life's most turbulent and devastating experiences. No one writes as affectingly about passion, about time and memory, about violence--subjects that have shaped Ondaatje's previous novels. But there is a greater muscularity to Divisadero, an intensity born from its restraint. Episodes are boiled down to their essential elements, distilled but dramatic, resulting in a mosaic of profound dignity, with an elegiac quietude that only the greatest of writers can achieve. --Jhumpa Lahiri
Product Description
From the celebrated author of The English Patient and Anil's Ghost comes a remarkable, intimate novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time.
In the 1970s in Northern California a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it is shattered by an incident of violence that sets fire to the rest of their lives. Divisadero takes us from San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada's casinos and eventually to the landscape of southern France. As the narrative moves back and forth through time and place, we find each of the characters trying to find some foothold in a present shadowed by the past.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 57 more reviews...
 "Everything is collage" July 21, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Michael Ondaatje writes in his new novel, "[T]here is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross." At one level "Divisadero" is such a collage, spreading scenarios across more than one hundred years and several continents. Initially seemingly disconnected events and individual stories are nevertheless intertwined in some way. They converge around Anna, the anchor in the narrative who brings the different segments together. At another level, Ondaatje's exquisitely written novel is about recurring themes of identity, love, loss and pain, and the potentially healing power of passing time and remembrance. Completely absorbing, I found it deeply moving and enriching. A book to be read more than once to be fully appreciated in composition and content.
A certain mystique surrounds the title; its varied possible interpretations find their echo in the structure of the novel and the personal histories of the protagonists. According to Anna "divisadero" means "to divide" and also "to gaze at from afar". A pivotal experience at some point in each protagonist's life has broken its continuity, resulting in a major change or split in their life from then on. Some inner consolidation may be achieved as time allows for re-examination of the past and discovering of similarities in others. Ondaatje uses different voices and perspectives to bring to the reader more than one linear narrative. The novel's structure also reminded me of a musical composition: across the distinct 'movements' themes are nonetheless recurring, and innocuous motifs, such as the shards of glass, can take on symbolic character in their repetition; parallels in the protagonists' lives are slowly revealed and linkages established. With each reiteration, new aspects of the story are introduced for the reader to explore.
The actual plot can be summarized very quickly. It is evidently not Ondaatje's primary motivation for writing "Divisadero". His interest clearly lies in exploring the essence of his characters, their feelings and sensuality, their interaction with others and their physical environments and finally, their ability to recover (or not) from deep trauma. A widower raises his daughter, Anna, and adopts an orphan girl, Claire, born on the same day, as a pseudo twin sister for her. Coop, son of a local farm hand, also an orphan, is added to the small family. When the girls are sixteen, a devastating event abruptly ends the until then mostly idyllic life in rural northern California. They break apart, each coping in a different way with what they experienced. "The raw truth of an incident never ends" Anna reflects later on. Claire's and Coop's stories are interleafed with Anna's. Coop's character, in particular, is expertly drawn, as he lives out the challenges of his youth.
We meet "Anna" again, living in Southern France, as a biographer, researching the life of Lucien Seguro, a little known author who lived there nearly a century ago. She has since shed her name and former identity. Her life becomes indirectly linked to the writer she studies, in part through Rafael, who was connected to Lucien in a similar vein that Coop was connected to Anna's family. While the narrative switches to Seguro's life, his coming of age and the people surrounding him, we are led to make connections, see parallels. Ondaatje's sensitive exploration of the growing fondness between Lucien and his young neighbour, Marie-Neige, is one of the most touching and haunting love stories one can imagine. Comparisons are invited between Anna's life and Lucien's. At every stage, though, Ondaatje leaves us guessing who the narrator is. Is everything written by Anna? Nietzsche's "We have art, so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth", is initially introduced by Anna on page one of the novel, and later repeated. While we are receiving signals that Anna's recollections may not be necessarily the only version of the truth, Ondaatje leaves the question open to interpretation. In a wider sense, encompassing the whole novel, there are hints of an "invented life" - to make it less painful and to come to terms with her abandonment of her sister and Coop in a time of crisis. The beginning is in the end completing the collage created. [Friederike Knabe]
Master of his Craft July 10, 2008
Michael Ondaatje is an excellent writer and story teller, and this book displays all of his skills. The use of common elements and themes throughout this book, which is really about five short stories knitted together with the frailest of threads. I suppose there are lessons of life, about priorities and gaps that are never closed or closed too late in our lives, often with severe results. The book moves along quickly and keeping the characters straight can be a chore, but if one takes the time they will be rewarded, this is a gem.
Relevant and enjoyable July 2, 2008
As someone familiar with Divisadero street, but not at all familiar with the wanderings of Northern California, I really enjoyed this book. Some of the tales - just what happened - remain unfinished - but at the same time it leaves you feeling that the characters are complete.
I have always enjoyed this author. His tales of Sri Lanka and overcoming conflict are a pleasure to read.
Lush Mosaic of lyrical love and lament.... June 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
DIVISDERO grabs the reader from the very beginning and the multi-layered, page turning plot reveals that the connections in time, both present and past, continually circle our lives to mold and shape us. We are ever haunted by these flowing and ebbing moments.
Reading Ondaatje's rich prose is like sitting down to a gourmand's feast and slowly working through the pleasurable, excellently prepared courses. It's as if a `courtesan of words' is seducing and dazzling you with unpredictable, intriguing stories. Ondaajte's descriptions are nakedly beautiful scenes of majestic texture and captivating imagery.
His poetic skills are woven into the narration with a subtle, yet radiant passion.
The novel at first appears to fashion fragments of lives as the story unfolds by flowing both forward and backward in time.
In time we realize the fluid connection, the critical moments that define and `circle' the unforgettable characters and create the dreamlike images and hear the elegant prose of his language.
The two distinct parts of the novel were difficult to align and didn't become fully realized until the very end.
Anna likens it to a villanelle...."this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle's form refuses to move forward in linear development.."
Still, there were, for me, a few loose ends in the final pages that I would have enjoyed to have been tied up before closing this powerful, evocative tapestry...
Highly recommended!
 Disappointing read from Ondaatje June 17, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Michael Ondaatje's Divisardo is the first novel I have read, or rather tried to read, by this critically-acclaimed author of The English Patient. I'm sorry to report that I was disappointed with this latest Ondaatje effort. So much so in fact that I didn't even finish it-which is a rarity for me. Once I get halfway through a book, I feel obligated somehow to finish it. Not so here. I got to page 191 (total page count is 273) and couldn't not go any farther. I thought maybe it was because I was eager to read Jay Asher's debut novel, Thirteen Reasons Why. I came back to Divisardo after completing Thirteen, but it was too late; I was too bored with the undefined plot line to read the rest.
Divisardo is, supposedly, about three children who are raised together, Claire, Coop, and Anna. Anna and Coop had an affair, and he turned into a professional gambler. That's as much as the non-linear structure as I could figure out. Well, Anna is studying French writer Lucien Segura. Other reviewers have mentioned the parallel of Anna and Claire with Segura's daughters, but I didn't even see a reference to them in the pages I read.
One of the biggest issues I had with the text was voice. All the characters sounded the same, and all were flat. Whether the scene was violent or sanguine, it became increasingly difficult to determine who was talking when because of the sameness in tone and voice. This is the one time that a varied sentence structure could have worked wonders for a piece.
The San Francisco Chronicle called Divisardo "Brilliant...plays whimsically with chronology and memory, with fantasy and historical fact." Author Jhumpa Lahiri called the work "a mosiac of profound dignity, with an elegiac quietude that only the greatest of writers can achieve." Me? I just went "huh?"
Armchair Interviews says: Heed this reviewer's comments.
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