Divisadero (Paperback)

~ Michael Ondaatje (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Random House Inc. (January 1, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0307389758
• ISBN-13: 978-0307389756
• ASIN: B001C09KBW
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #476,563 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing from Ondaatje, June 4, 2009

By	Michael C. Tighe "Bookbinger" (Glide, Oregon) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.