Divisadero

This is one of the most beautiful books I have read--a stunning collage of complex characters. Ondaatje leaves you aching for more.

Michael Ondaatje is a poet, and even as a novelist he writes as one. I don't mean simply his mastery of the English language; that is a given. At times, he is almost Olympian, as when describing the metamorphosis of a marriage: "There would be years of compatibility, and then bitterness, and who knew when that line was traversed, on what night, at what hour. Over what betrayal. They slipped over this as over a faint rise in the road, like a small vessel crossing the equator unaware, so that in fact their whole universe was now upside down." But he can switch effortlessly to the here and now, describing a fight in a thunderstorm, or a poker game in a casino, with an immediacy that makes the writing almost invisible. He can conjure up images that fix themselves indelibly on the cinema of the mind (or on the big screen, as anybody who has seen the movie of THE ENGLISH PATIENT will know); my favorite is a two-page description of a gypsy boy and his horse caught in a total eclipse in the South of France. One sentence must suffice: "Grey rain started falling in the half-light, though it was the wind that bewildered everything, arcing the trees down so they hovered almost parallel to the ground." Ondaatje cannot describe what happens without also evoking how it feels. But he seldom attempts to describe a feeling directly. Rather, he creates something else to stand beside it, illuminating it by association, from the side rather than full on. A simple example is the consummation of the marriage between a French peasant, Roman, and his very young bride. He goes out in the moonlight to wash in the rain barrel outside the cottage door; after a while, she follows him and washes also. "After that she turned and put her arms out along the thick rim of the barrel where in the water was the moon and the ghost of her face. Roman moved against her, and in the next while, whatever surprise there was, whatever pain, there was also the frantic moon in front of her shifting and breaking into pieces in the water." In terms of narrative, Ondaatje could have set this scene anywhere, or omitted it entirely; but in terms of its place in the emotional balance of the whole novel, nothing else would have been so powerful or so evocative. Images of this kind, based on imagination rather than logic, are the essence of Ondaatje's poetic sensibility. What of the story? The back-cover blurb is true as far as it goes: "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. . . . As the narrative moves back and forth through time and place, we find each of these characters trying to gain some foothold in a present shadowed by the past." After the violent beginning (whose nature I shall not reveal), the story moves forward several decades

Booker prizewinning author Michael Ondaatje admits in a newspaper interview that his new book, "Divisadero" turned out to be an unintentional prose experiment. Some describe this novel as two loosely interlocking novellas, with similar themes that repeat--not directly but more like echoes. I certainly wouldn't call it a novel, nor would I say it is a collection of loosely overlapping short stories. It is in a class by itself--outlandish, groundbreaking, brazen, deliciously original. What's important is that is succeeds magnificently. Michael Ondaatje admits that he was also completely surprised when the second story pushed itself through the first and wouldn't let go. He just let the two stories evolve, side-by-side. When he was done sketching out the whole, he jumbled up the pieces and put them back together in a new, wholly fresh and revealing way that highlights the rich thematic scaffolding supporting the whole. If you love your literature with a strong narrative, you will be sorely disappointed by this work. Both stories barely qualify as complete tales. In some respects, the work is like two long prose-poems, where the reader is expected to fill in the missing pieces. The mental and emotional satisfaction of this book comes unquestionably with the beauty and weight of the whole. But there is also a great deal of joy to be had merely in lingering over Ondaatje's sensuous, imaginative, and unforgettable prose. Personally, I absolutely loved it. I read it twice in quick succession. Then I waited almost a week after finishing it the second time before writing this review. That's new for me. Typically I write a review shortly after finishing the book. But this work kept me fully engaged and intellectually entertained for a long time after the reading stopped. Without question, there is far more heft to this work than a normal novel. I found my mind working overtime remembering passages and then jumping back to the book to reread them. When I least expected it, new thematic insights would pop into my mind unleashing a cascade of more research, rereading, and reflection. This book definitely hot-wired my brain! I found my creative mind taking possession of my daydreams, spinning out delightfully missing story pieces. In a similar fashion, while quietly reflecting on one of the books many themes, out of the blue, some long-half-forgotten event in my own past would reappear and resonate on a similar wavelength. The joy of reading this book was exceptionally long-term and deeply satisfying on both an intellectual and personal level. I would not hesitate to recommend this book highly to all lovers of modern literary fiction.

A synopsis of this book cannot do it justice. Enough reviews have contained content, so I will only add that this is a book that made me glad that I love reading so. It is a book that is so absorbing, it blocks out externals -- attention remains focussed even in noisy cafes. Each section could stand alone as a novella in itself, but as an integrated whole, it is an astounding reading experience.

A few books in my all time top ten never change. There are two Ondaatje books there, THE ENGLISH PATIENT being one, and IN THE SKIN OF A LION being the other and my personal favorite. I was disappointed with ANIL'S GHOST and picked up DIVISERADO with mixed feelings. From the first image to the last line I read this book with my heart in my mouth. I had to force myself to read it slowly and repeat sections, they were so beautiful and contained so much. I can't praise this book enough, it's totally awesome. It's next to my bed now and all I want to do is re-read it. I know it will be a long time before I read anything half as good. Just read this book - it's an amazing tapestry of life.

Divisadero, one of Michael Ondaatje's characters helpfully informs us, is a street in San Francisco, a former dividing line between the city and the open area of the Presidio. Then again, the character tells us, perhaps the name comes from the Spanish divisar, meaing to "gaze at something from a distance," from a vantage point where one can see far. While the actual street and the city of San Francisco have little significance to the story, both of these inferred meanings come into play as Ondaatje unwinds two parallel tales, nearly a century apart, of natural and acquired families, of passions and betrayals and deaths, and of orphaned children and equally abandoned parents. DIVISADERO, the book, offers two intertwined stories, connected through the peculiar literary researches of one of the modern characters named Anna. Anna specializes in writing biographies of history's secondary characters, the unkown individuals who orbit the lives of the famous. She has chosen for her latest subject an obscure, one-eyed, turn-of-the-century French poet named Lucien Segura. Anna's explorations lead her to occupy the last house where Segura lived. While there, she meets and interviews Segura's semi-adopted son Rafael, ultimately engaging him in a sexual affair. In a dreamlike recounting of Segura's life that appears meant to be viewed as Anna's biographical voice, we later learn that Lucien was more successful as the anonymous author of a series of light escapist fictions based on his romantic imaginings of a lost love than he was as a poet. Ondaatje launches into three more intertwined narratives centered on Segura - his lifelong enamoration with his childhood neighbor Marie-Neige and her husband Roman, his encapsulation of Marie-Neige and Roman's lives into his highly popular light fictions, and his relationship in later years with Rafael and his gypsy parents Aria and Liebard/Astolphe. Segura's frustrations over his lost childhood infatuation with Marie-Neige and his inadvertent sighting of his pregnant daughter in flagrante delicto in an outdoor shower with his second daughter's fiancé lead him to abandon his wife and family for life as a recluse. Gradually, of course, his life reopens in its new surroundings and he befriends Rafael's itinerant family, taking young Rafael under his literary wing. When Rafael's family eventually decides to pull up stakes and head north following the Great War, Segura is effectively orphaned, left in solitude to end his life in a romantically poetic fashion. Early on in the book, Ondaatje informs us that "the past was a strange inheritance that fell upside down into one's life like an image through a camera obscura." Not long after, Anna describes herself as the "person who discovers subtexts in history and art, where the spiralling among a handful of strangers tangles into a story." So naturally, Anna's life story twists like a DNA strand around Segura's, forming a complementary double helix. Anna we learn early in