Customer Reviews

Divisadero

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

It is difficult to write a review for a novel that rises above superlatives. Ondaatje is one of the world's greatest living writers, and Divisadero is his finest novel. At times it rises to the level of true greatness, and it is the most challenging novel I have ever read. It is also my new favorite.

Be forewarned: this is not a light read. The prose is smooth and lyrical and unmistakably Ondaatje. The novel focuses on memory, the past, and violence as his prior works have but Divisadero takes the concept one step further: it is separated into three distinct sections, overlapping enough only to give the reader a reason to continue reading. It reads more like a collection of three novellas than it does a novel. It also travels in reverse chronological order. I considered the opening section to be the main story, with the following stories as the reflections spoken of in the novel's last line.

This is not a novel that concerns itself heavily with plot. It is an exploration of its themes first and foremost. I don't want to speak for the author, but it seems to me it was not written to be a page turner. If that is what you're expecting I think you'll probably be disappointed. Any hope of that will be gone with the abrupt end to the opening section. But don't give up because of it. There are many novels with compelling stories: there are few that treat its reader with as much respect as Divisadero. Ondaatje tells you a story, but not all of it. He leaves the unwritten to the reader to piece together. What does it mean that Coop/Anna and Segura both have blue tables they treasure? What does it mean that Coop becomes a card player and Segura names Ramon's sidekick `One-eyed Jaques'? What does it mean that the colors of Anna's five flags are all represented in Segura's story, from the color of Marie-Neige's dress to the white mucus of diphtheria? My hat is off to you if you were able to decipher their meanings on your first read. I sure couldn't. But multiple readings are exactly what this book is all about. I'm not sure I agree with Amazon's description of the links between past and present as being `explosive', but they are definitely meaningful, and I would argue they are the core of the novel. I never -- NEVER -- reread books within a year, but this is going to be a notable exception.

This novel in one word: Haunting. It will stay with you for a long time. Ondaatje is a master.

There's much to enjoy in this new Ondaatje novel--all his usual gifts are on display--but I was disappointed. First, it seems too many serious writers these days are obsessed with writing itself as a metaphor for life and all its existential complexity. Ondaatje tries to include the "world" in his tortured literary effort--e.g., clunky references to the two Gulf Wars--but in the end the novel and its concerns feel terribly self-involved and self-referential, like he's finally given into a private world just as his characters Lucien Segura, Rafael, and Anna have done. Art as an escape from truth. Nietzsche deserves a better interpretation! Second, I found it needlessly confusing. I know we're not supposed to admit this -- we're supposed to pretend that it all makes sense--but does it? Early on Anna recounts a shared memory in the barn with her sister Claire. She says that "even now" they remember it differently. When is even now? She runs away from home and never goes back as far as we know, so when do she and Anna get together and compare memories? Also, how can her telling of Lucien's life story contain resonances with Coop's life after she left, a life of which she knows nothing? Are we to believe in magic here, or are we to believe that the family at some point reunites?

Don't get me wrong, the book is a pleasurable serious read. I read it in one sitting (one long plane ride). But it became increasingly disappointing as it went on. He refuses to tell a straight story--I get it--but the (perhaps) unintended effect of his narrative stubbornness is that as the book went on I wanted basically one thing: to know what happened to Coop, whom he abandons at mid-book. You can't just create a character and a story line as compelling as this one and then throw it away as if it started to smell bad to you. It smacks of an author who might disdain his own readers.

And, finally, I felt the book was haunted by Ian McEwan's superior Atonement. This may be cruel, but this book felt like a convoluted knock-off of it.

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 the novel has two "acquired" siblings, a false twin named Claire (an orphan) whom Anna's father adopts at the same time Anna was born, her mother having passed away in childbirth. The two girls share an older "false brother" named Coop, another unofficial adoptee, a farmhand whose parents had been murdered in his early youth. When Anna's father later discovers his 15-year-old daughter in flagrante delicto with Coop, he beats the young man nearly senseless and causes Anna to nearly kill her father with a shard of glass (paralleling Segura's loss of eyesight from the shattered glass of a window in his youth). Coop disappears, as does Anna, and the family unit is largely shattered. Coop, by far DIVISADERO's most engaging character, elevates his fanciful dreams of youth - striking it rich while panning for gold - into a career as a cardsharp. Claire, later working for the San Francisco D.A.'s office, unexpectedly runs into Coop in Lake Tahoe just as he endures another physical beating and his life takes a dramatic turn for the worse.

Some readers may indeed be taken by Ondaatje's impeccable prose, which gravitates from an eerily Cormac McCarthy-like voice in Coop's story to a faintly 19th Century European voice in Segura's tale. Others may be put off by the abrupt dropping of Claire and Coop's story - even Anna's story more or less fades into Segura's denoument. Parallels, of course, abound in the two story lines, from One-Eyed Jacques alluding to Coop's gambling and Coop's gambling partner The Dauphin referring to French royal lineage to Claire's tending to the damaged Coop as Segura imagines he tends to the dying Marie. In the end, however, Ondaatje tells us that life goes on, that successive generations unintentionally retell the same stories and interpret the past and their own histories in the light of one another. In DIVISADERO's closing scene over the silent lake, he writes, "Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible." Humans are little different, he is telling us.

Having read Michael Ondaatje's riveting novel, "The English Patient," and seen the movie, I was happy to pick up his novel, "Divisadero," but was somewhat disappointed by the time I put it down.

Initially, the novel tells the story of an unusual family in Northern California in the 1970s. A father, who loses his wife in childbirth, brings home his daughter Anna and another motherless infant Claire and raises them as sisters. He has also taken in a young boy, a few years older than the girls, Coop, whose parents have been murdered. Coop does the work of a farmhand on their Petaluma ranch, Claire enjoys riding, and Anna is a writer and thinker.

Years pass, the girls become teenagers, and the father nearly beats Coop to death when he catches him making love to Anna. Anna runs away, Claire nurses Coop back to health, and he disappears, and here the novel takes a different direction, tracing the three young people into their adult lives, Coop as a professional gambler in Nevada, Anna an academic researcher in France, and Claire working in the Public Defender's Office in San Francisco.

In their different voices, each of them continues to reflect on the climactic events of their past. At just about the midpoint of the novel, Ondaatje mentions the villanelle, a poetic form. This occurs immediately after Anna, in France, has seen a thirteenth century church belfry with a helix shape, doubling back on itself. This reminds her of the form of the villanelle, and she sees her life in that light. "It's like 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, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion." Three pages later, thinking about Claire and Coop, Anna speculates, "Perhaps it is because small things repeat their importance on a farm and make them indelible in our memory."

These ruminations come right in the middle of Ondaatje's novel, and I think he is giving the reader a clue to the structure of this strange novel, that he is following the poetic form of the villanelle in his telling of the story of Anna, Claire, and Coop, doubling back to "those familiar moments of emotion."

Claire does get to see Coop again, and he has gotten into trouble again as a gambler. Then the novel moves to Anna's life in France, and here is where the disappointment came for me as a reader. The novel drifts into telling the story of the literary figure Anna is researching and essentially concludes without returning to the original story. The novel has received nothing but praise from the critics, but Ondaatje's method here has left this reader unsatisfied.

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.

I have been a reader of Ondaatje's work for over 20 years, and a new release is always reason enough to put my life and family on hold. As both a teacher of writing and (an aspiring) writer myself, I read him not only for his content, but also for his amazing, unparalled form. Once again, he's written a truly beautiful book, graced with complex characters and non-linear plotlines. And once again I opened the cover, prepared to lose myself in his prose. Well, perhaps it was me, my own state of mind, etc, but although I enjoyed the book more than most of the others I've picked up recently, I was not left with that same sense of loss and awe when I had finished. The writing, while still fluid and lovely, seemed just a bit less poetic than in previous works. I felt at times as though I were reading the work of a student or imitator of Ondaatje's rather than the master himself--a very disconcerting sensation. And yet, for all that, I still recommend the book highly, because with or without my personal concerns, it makes for a wonderful read, and as stated earlier, exists on a literary plane high above the vast majority of its peers.

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.

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, though with frequent flashbacks. Coop, private and principled and extremely likeable, has unexpectedly become a professional gambler. Claire is a legal aide in San Francisco; her path will eventually re-cross his, bringing about a sort of partial ending two-thirds of the way through the book. Anna has become an author under a different name, writing biographies (or biographical novels; it is never quite clear) about minor French literary figures. Currently, she is working on a poet called Lucien Segura, and staying in the house where he spent his last years; these scenes in a remote part of Southern France make a wonderful contrast to those in California and Nevada.

But just where you might expect Ondaatje to pull everything together, he drops Coop, Claire, and Anna almost entirely, and starts a new set of stories about Segura's younger years, his loves and marriage, his experiences in the First World War, and the gypsy family he befriends when he buries himself in his last retreat. The whole texture of the book changes. These are engaging vignettes, created in short chapters, poetical and imagistic rather than factual, and this reader was soon swept up in them as though by a new novel. Indeed, I found that I couldn't stop reading once this section had started, partly out of sheer affection for the characters and delight in the writing, but partly to discover how Ondaatje would finally tie the two parts of the book together. Somewhere along the line, I began to realize that he wouldn't -- except in the sense that Segura's story was essentially being told (or perhaps invented) by Anna, in much the same way that the story of the two lovers in Ian McEwan's ATONEMENT is extended in the writing of the younger sister Briony. So far from this being a single sweeping canvas, as the cover suggests, it is constructed as a diptych: two separate panels (Ondaatje himself uses this image, in a different context) that enter into a dialogue with each other rather than connecting directly.

DIVISADERO? There is a street of that name in San Francisco, where Anna apparently lived for a while, but the novel does not take place there. The sense of the word as "division" or "break" is obviously appropriate for this family parted by passion and scattered through space. But Anna points out that the word may also derive from the Spanish "divisar," to look at something from a distance. By the end of the book, Anna is indeed looking on from a distance, exploring her life in art, as Nietzsche once said, so as not to be destroyed by the truth. This is essentially what any great novelist does, and with it Ondaatje invites the reader into the heart of his craft. Yet he gives us an even greater gift; by avoiding literal connections between his two stories, but instead inspiring our imagination and trusting us to find our own parallels, he gets us not only to read his words as a poet, but to think and feel as poets in ourselves.

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 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.