Divisadero | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Ondaatje
Creator: Hope Davis
Publisher: Random House Audio
Category: Book
List Price: $39.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  70 reviews
Sales Rank: 586019
Format: Audiobook, Unabridged
Media: Audio CD
Edition: Unabridged
Number Of Items: 7
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.1
Dimensions (in): 5.9 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0739343491
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780739343494
ASIN: 0739343491
Publication Date: May 29, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
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 In the Skin of a Lion comes a remarkable new novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time.
In the 1970s in Northern California, near Gold Rush country, 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 riven by an incident of violence—of both hand and heart—that sets fire to the rest of their lives.
Divisadero takes us from the city of San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada’s casinos and eventually to the landscape of south-central France. It is here, outside a small rural village, that Anna becomes immersed in the life and the world of a writer from an earlier time—Lucien Segura. His compelling story, which has its beginnings at the turn of the century, circles around “the raw truth” of Anna’s own life, the one she’s left behind but can never truly leave. And as the narrative moves back and forth in time and place, we discover each of the characters managing to find some foothold in a present rough hewn from the past.
Breathtakingly evoked and with unforgettable characters, Divisadero is a multilayered novel about passion, loss, and the unshakable past, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. It is Michael Ondaatje’s most intimate and beautiful novel to date.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 65 more reviews...
Enraptured by Ondaatje's style October 7, 2008
I am one of those who thoroughly enjoys Ondaatje's writings. Though floaty and dreamlike, his stories always manage to be 'real' enough to me to keep me engaged from beginning to end. And Divisadero didn't disappoint - until I reached the end. I tend to be of the same opinion as some of the other reviewers who felt that Ondaatje ultimately left a little too much to the readers' imaginations. I did feel a wee bit cheated.
But, that said, I thoroughly did enjoy his typical poetic style, the surprising depth of character development and sympathy he managed to elicit with his unconventional sparseness. And, anytime I finish a book within 48 hours, it's been a worthwhile read.
 Literary smoke and mirrors September 19, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
At the risk of sounding like an unsophisticated yokel who is unable to appreciate the literary brilliance of this novel, Divisadero failed to make much of an impression on me. The prose is eloquent, and the novel is ripe with the kinds of themes, symbols, and motifs that College English professors live for, but for me, it just wasn't enough.
Divisadero is essentially two novels: one a present day story (with a flashback to the youth of the modern day characters) and the other set in 19th Century Europe. These dual stories parallel each other and this, it would seem, is pretty much the point of the novel. In the final scene of the novel, the author writes of birds flying over the still water of a lake as close to their reflections as possible. This is the overriding theme of the novel, the past reflected in the future.
And while, on some level, I can appreciate the imagery provided by broken glass and photographs and reflections on still water, it's no substitute for a compelling story. And the story was compelling - at first. But then Ondaatje abandons the modern day story, rather abruptly, which is a shame.
Yes, this is a beautifully written novel. It has layers and depth and demands to be read more than once if you want to fully appreciate its literary cleverness. It's the kind of novel that someone could write a really good English Lit paper on. But I would have enjoyed the novel more if the author had focused on telling a compelling story that could stand on its own and didn't need to rely on the literary equivalent of 'smoke and mirrors'.
Beautifully written, but... September 10, 2008
Michael Ondaatje writes beautifully, poetically, even. "The English Patient" is one of my favorite books ever. But "Divisadero" was disjointed and its plot(s) were disappointing. The book was really three short stories only tangentially related and only one had a complete story line. There were two elements that ran through the three stories -- a blue table which seemed to stand for unhappy love affairs and cut glass which seemed to stand for tragedy/pain/loss of (in)sight? A "book club questionnaire" at the end of the book may have helped me understand what I should have been getting from it. But as a writer and a prolific reader, I was not satisfied with this book.
Incomplete September 9, 2008
This was one of the most difficult books I've ever read. I enjoyed the English Patient and I've always enjoyed Ondaatje's style --- but Divisadero became torture to finish. Nearly every chapter set a new plot line, as if no matter how involved you became in any part of a story, it was a passing visit. It became more than frustrating as I turned each page only to find some new story. The first part of the book, the story of Coop, Anna and Claire, kept me interested, but where did it go? Did these people just drop off the end of the earth? Although I enjoy the subtleties of Russian literature, the second "division" of the book, nearly totally unrelated to the first (except by attenuation) not only never engaged me, it left me wondering what Ondaatje was doing. While the language was nearly poetic, the final story lines, what I could make of them, became more like watching a flag flap in the wind. I finally quit. This book is a compilation of incomplete short stories. I give it an A for language and an F for coherence. I know Ondaatje can do better.
 DIVISADERO--PURE MAGIC September 5, 2008
Some years ago, after Michael Ondaatje had written "The English Patient," I finagled an invitation to a private reading held by the Canadian Consulate for an exclusive group of business executives. Upon arrival, my husband and I were quickly unmasked as fakes, but, enduring the slings and arrows of whispered remarks and sidelong glances, we held our ground and remained for the reading. When Ondaatje appeared, I found him a simple man in dress, humble in manner, and a diffident reader of his works. I recall thinking that if only I wrote prose like his I would strut, not fret, my hour upon the stage.
After reading this introduction, you'll probably not be very surprised by my confession that when it comes to Michael Ondaatje's works I'm like a besotted teenager when faced with the object of her desire. I find his words magical, his creations dreamlike. Which brings me to "Divisadero," Ondaatje's most recent novel, a much debated and often maligned work.
In "Divisadero" Ondaatje explores the bonds of family: the family given us through blood-relation and the family we choose. Anna, is the only daughter of a Northern California widowed farmer who adopts another girl, Claire, when Anna's and Claire's mothers both die in childbirth. Born just hours apart, Claire becomes Anna's "twin." The orphaned son of a neighboring farm couple, Coop, is already part of the family. "Divisadero" is the story of these three. We meet them briefly as teenagers, see the family torn apart, then follow each of them as they continue their separate lives. Claire and Coop meet again, accidentally, but providentially.
Coop's story seems to strike some reviewers as the least satisfactory, charging the writer with having created and then abandoned this character. Coop represents the random violence all of us often face in life through war, fate, or of our own making. Coop's parents were murdered when he was just a boy, he is taken into this neighboring family, then expelled, cruelly and violently. Although he is a temperate man, violence follows him like his own shadow until Claire gently guides him home. This, to me, is a very poignant scene and a most satisfactory conclusion to Coop's story.
But Anna is the focus and storyteller of "Divisadero." Although she leaves home and country, her siblings and father are never far from her heart and mind. She finds her soulmate in the past life of Lucien Segura, a poet whose writing and life story she explores as she settles into his house in the small village in Southern France and chooses his "adopted" son as companion. This is where Ondaatje's writing turns truly magical. As Anna's and Segura's stories intertwine, the scenes become stunningly sensual, gorgeously trancelike.
When I finished "Divisadero," I felt such a loss, I had to re-read this book at once. I wanted again to take part in the lives of the ill-fated Marie-Neige and her husband, Roman, an incarnation of the enigmatic Coop, all raw rage, which he is unable to verbalize. I wanted again to eat a simple meal of herbs and onions grown in the garden of a small farm house in Southern France on a warm summer's day. And I wanted again to dance with no purpose with a cat. So find yourself a quiet corner in a garden or a sun-filled room and let one of our generation's greatest writers awaken your senses, touch your heart, and seduce you with this magic dance called "Divisadero."
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