Divisadero

by Michael Ondaatje

Després d' El pacient anglès , Ondaatje demostra la seva extraordinària capacitat per moure's en el difícil terreny dels sentiments i per tractar les passions, les pèrdues i la persistència del passat, així com també les exigències de la família, de l'amor i dels records.
Un relat d'inusual intensitat i bellesa capaç d'emocionar-nos i de deixar-nos sense alè.

«Ondaatje escriu sobre l'amor i aconsegueix que, en un deliri, la prosa assoleixi una bellesa exorbitant.»
The Times

En la més íntima i bella de les seves històries, Michael Ondaatje narra la vida d'Anna, qui, arran d'un brutal esdeveniment que ha tingut lloc a casa seva, haurà de deixar enrere la vida a la granja de Califòrnia i començar de nou al sud de França. Lluny del seu pare, de la seva germana Claire i de Coop -un noi misteriós acollit per la família-, trobarà en la literatura i en la reconstrucció de la biografia d'un important escriptor la manera de reconciliar-se amb el seu passat. Una novel·la de vides creuades que s'estén per dos continents i al llarg d'un segle.

Genres: Fiction, Canada, Book Club, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Historical Fiction, Novels

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 29, 2007

About the author

Philip Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, fiction writer, and essayist, renowned for his contributions to both poetry and prose. He was born in Colombo in 1943, to a family of Tamil and Burgher descent. Ondaatje emigrated to Canada in 1962, where he pursued his education, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Toronto and a Master of Arts from Queen's University.
Ondaatje’s literary career began in 1967 with his poetry collection The Dainty Monsters, followed by his celebrated The Collected Works of Billy the Kid in 1970. His poetry earned him numerous accolades, including the Governor General’s Award for his collection There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do: Poems 1973–1978 in 1979. He published 13 books of poetry, exploring diverse themes and poetic forms.
In 1992, Ondaatje gained international fame with the publication of his novel The English Patient, which won the Booker Prize and was later adapted into an Academy Award-winning film. His other notable works include In the Skin of a Lion (1987), Anil’s Ghost (2000), and Divisadero (2007), which won the Governor General’s Award. Ondaatje’s novel Warlight (2018) was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
Aside from his writing, Ondaatje has been influential in fostering Canadian literature. He served as an editor at Coach House Books, contributing to the promotion of new Canadian voices. He also co-edited Brick, A Literary Journal, and worked as a founding trustee of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.
Ondaatje’s work spans various forms, including plays, documentaries, and essays. His 2002 book The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film earned him critical acclaim and won several awards. His plays have been adapted from his novels, including The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter.
Over his career, Ondaatje has been honored with several prestigious awards. He was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1988, upgraded to Companion in 2016, and received the Sri Lanka Ratna in 2005. In 2016, a new species of spider, Brignolia ondaatjei, was named in his honor.
Ondaatje’s personal life is also intertwined with his literary pursuits. He has been married to novelist Linda Spalding, and the couple co-edits Brick. He has two children from his first marriage and is the brother of philanthropist Sir Christopher Ondaatje. He was also involved in a public stand against the PEN American Center's decision to honor Charlie Hebdo in 2015, citing concerns about the publication's anti-Islamic content.
Ondaatje’s enduring influence on literature and his ability to blend personal history with universal themes in his writing continue to shape Canadian and world literature.

Reviews

[Jaidee · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 "hypnagogic" stars !!

2015 Silver Award (2nd Favorite Read)

What is this book? Oh my goodness.... Oh my goodness.... Oh my God!!

Mr. Ondaatje captured snippets of dreams and put them in a beautiful violet tinged jar and shook them gently until they coalesced into one syrupy whole.

I wanted to read this book slowly but I could not as the prose had a force of its own. It made me quiver with melancholy and at times made my heart skip in joy. Everything unfinished but infused with a primitive wisdom that seeped deep down into my consciousness. Characters loosely sketched in greys, mauves and indigo....moving towards love at the price of life, sanity and freedom.

I am truly amazed at the genius of this writing and through these weeks felt the words of this novel tickle my chin, stoke my heart and feed my soul. I am so incredibly moved as I write this...the way I am when I witness the birth of kittens, the Pacific Ocean in a storm or deep in conversation with God.

This little review may make little sense but I sincerely hope you experience some of the depth of feeling I felt as I read Mr. Ondaatje's Divisadero.

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Divisadero is not a story about the things that happened; it is a story about the things that were felt, and there is no living author better at telling a tale of feelings than Michael Ondaatje.

Ondaatje's prose is poetry, and for me, his poetry is lyrically sublime, in the romantic sense of the word. I am awed by what he does, and I long to do it in my own prose.

I don't care whether Anna and Coop and Claire ever find each other through the divisions of solitude they've embraced, and I don't feel at all cheated by never knowing. I don't care how Roman disappeared, where Astolphe came from, what happened to Anna and Raphael, nor when Marie-Neige died because Ondaatje makes me care more about what they felt in the short, intoxicatingly brief moments that he lets me share with them.

But more than all of these wonderfully realized characters, I love Lucien. One-eyed, desolate, literary, simple yet complex, war ravaged, marriage ravaged, love ravaged but rich in love, sensuous, sensual, paternal in spite of himself, childlike, needy, giving and other things I am certain I have missed. His story is Divisadero to me, in much the same way that Caravaggio was The English Patient. And though his story is inextricably bound to the life of Anna, his literary biographer, illuminating the events of her life and the shattering moment that thrust her old life into the new, it is his love for his mother, his daughter, Marie-Neige, and Raphael that tell the story that reaches me most deeply.

I get Lucien in a way I don't get the others, or maybe it is simply that my own internal world most closely resembles his. Whichever it is, I am sad that my time with Lucien Segura -- poet, adventure novelist, lover, soldier, possible madman -- is over. And oh, how I wish I could read his poems and novels. Those fictional works of fiction sound marvelous, but it is not to be, and I imagine the best I can do is return to the pages of Divisadero when I need to connect with Lucien again. I am afraid that won't be enough, but it will have to do.

I had intended to write a review about Ondaatje's use of time and space, his skill with multiple perspectives, his intertextuality, his prose technique, his wide ranging settings, but my review became something other, which is fine by me. And I hope it is fine by you too.

But I must add a note of warning for anyone interested in reading Divisadero -- do not expect a classic story with easily wrapped up plot lines and linear movement of action. That is not, and has never been, how Ondaatje works. Come to Divisadero to lose yourself in the lives of fascinating people, to feel what they feel for just a moment. If you're looking for anything else you would be doing yourself a favour by staying away.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has beautiful writing, throughout...
I absolutely loved the story and characters at the beginning of the book that takes place in 1970’s Northern California. A father raising his daughters on their farm, alone, after the mother’s death, along with the neighbor boy Coop. The children grow to teens and an incident happens, and then suddenly the book veers off in a few different directions, time periods, and places.
I became a little confused at one point midway through, but then really enjoyed the other stories taking place, also!
This book did win an award, and I can see why.
Thanks to Jaidee’s lovely review that led me to read this!

[Sawsan · Rating 3 out of 5]

رواية للكاتب والشاعر السريلانكي مايكل أونداتجي وسرد بدون نهايات مرئية
حدث عنيف يُحدث انقسام حاد في حياة عائلة في الريف الأمريكي
ينتقل أونداتجي بين الماضي والحاضر ليتتبع حياة أبطال روايته
وفي محاولة للتعافي من الحزن والفقد تلجأ آنا الراوية إلى الأدب
تقوم بدراسة وتوثيق لأحد الأدباء الفرنسيين وتُعيد ترتيب تفاصيل حياته
فتتواصل الأحداث بين أزمان وأماكن مختلفة
العنوان جميل يعبر عن الانقسام الذاتي الداخلي الذي يحدث في النفس
عن وجود الانسان المادي في عالم, وذهنه وأفكاره ومشاعره تحيا في عالم آخر

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is full of the wisdom of a writer who is both a poet and a novelist. Divisadero: the divisions between our lives and the lives of others, and even between our most secret lives inside of us too secret to admit to ourselves. Divisadero: the connections between the divisions that cause us to yearn for the comfort of togetherness, of intimacy. On a palimpsest of a novel painted over by centuries of division and that longing for togetherness, Ondaatje brushes words that will stay with me for a long time. Every so often, I read a book that deeply affects me like this one, but it's not as frequent as I would like. This is a book to read for all the reasons we read for pleasure, and also for all of the life reading can give to life.

I have noticed that Ondaatje perceives men, especially his protagonists, as wounded souls, scarred and disfigured by the accidents of life, and disfigured also by the weight of responsibility that comes with being a man. This in no way detracts from his characterization of the burdens that women must carry. But as a man himself, Ondaatje understands the wordless anguish of being a man, with all of its opportunities, tragedies, successes, and yearnings for love. He sets words to that anguish. His wounded and vulnerable male characters are cared for and healed by the female characters, who they thank by healing them in return in different ways.

His prose here is full of masterfully crafted metaphors and full of pieces of wisdom about life, about writing, about what I said above, and about much more.

[Trish · Rating 1 out of 5]

God I did not like this book. Really, really did not like it. I read all the 4 and 5 star reviews, I get what people are saying, and I'm just not there. Why get us interested in characters and then abandon them? and why spend time telling us boring things about them (like a whole paragraph describing how she planted seeds in the field by scattering them instead of burying them) and then we find out about major dramatic events only in one passing sentence told as a part of someone else's narrative (like "------ was put in prison for nearly killing a man in a jealous rage"). This was like a bunch of pieces of stories. I get it - Divisadero. They're being divided. Lots and lots of divisions. And yes, we have a dark and stormy night, and bad things happen, and the snow comes down, and people are feeling upset - Isn't this a bit heavy handed? Never mind that setting a book in Northern California should prevent an ice storm from occurring (and no, it doesn't work for me to throw in a line later saying it was a rare event). And the last thing that drove me crazy was how the book just leaves out the How of things. There is no connection from one event to another - you are just supposed to leap. They know each other, and now they are sleeping together. We see no evidence of romance building, but boom there it is. So, it was not believable, and just felt like some clever writerly experiment. Which was not a pleasure to read.

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best novels I've ever read. Michael Ondaatje introduces us to a world of a dark rural California setting, where the love triangle of Claire and Anna, foster sisters; and their foster brother, Coop with whom both women fall for. Sexy, brooding, and dripping with a macho swagger, he reminds us of a character that actor Glenn Ford may have played.

After Claire's father catches Coop and Anna having sex, violence escalates where a huge fire is inevitable, the precarious threesome now broken up because of Anna and Coop violating the delicate balance of their relationship with Claire. Later the novel shifts from California to Europe, where Anna becomes a writer, obsessed with the work of a poet named Lucien Segura, and begins a sexual relationship with Lucien's friend Rafael.

Claire remains faithful to her father, and cares for him as she becomes a successful lawyer. Coop becomes a Las Vegas hustler, playing cards and playing women, having torrid affairs along the way. Claire finds him again, and his bond with her remembered. It's an eerie and surrealistic novel, with images of 1940s film noir permeating each page.

Also, its one of the few novels where the power of family rests on a chosen one, rejecting the nuclear heteronormativity of the 1950s. Like Anil's Ghost, The English Patient, and Coming to Slaughter- Mr. Ondaatje's work is poetic, fiery and obtuse where each riddle reminds us that putting back a broken heart takes time and space.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

For those who have not read an Ondaatje book before, "Divisadero" may not be a good first start. A newer reader may be expecting a plot that rises and crashes as much as the one developed in "The English Patient," which Ondaatje became known best for after the success of the film version. (And even if you haven't watched the movie 10 times over like some of us, you get it: War, lust, affair, secrets, heartbreak, the end.)

But for those who have eaten, lived and breathed his words relentlessly since that wonderfully told story, "Divisadero" is a welcome return to what Ondaatje brings beneath plot: an endless exploration through history and language, and an intimacy with characters unsure of their situations.

I couldn't turn three pages of "Divisadero" without learning a new word or anecdote or strategy to a different way of life. I'm convinced the man must read every book in the library to have such a catalog of knowledge. Did you know there's a word the old poets used for when a person calls their lover by a different name? How did people break down a rough field's terrain to turn it into rich soil before the days of Miracle Grow, Home Depots and pesticides? Ondaatje drops the answers and details to little bits without speaking above the reader or losing his characters in his explanations.

In reading "Divisadero," we walk through the different lives of a farmhand, a gambler, a gypsy and a writer. We learn not only about their trade, but also their fears and secrets, information casually unfolded much like a new friendship. For all that Ondaatje reveals about his characters, you almost feel as if he's trying to not reveal too much - he's holding a hand up to the camera at points, closing a door before too much air comes in. Their details fall underneath a loosely woven plot which is also detached, and has holes in it. This may be frustrating for those looking for a resolution - one demonstrated by actions and conclusions made by characters and narrators - but once you get past the untraditional structure, it feels very much like real life. These are lives like many of ours; even in good circumstances, our relationships and identity are divided by past and distance and conflict. We won't always know what brought us to here or there, or what made so-and-so act like that, or how to bring everyone back together after an almost unforgiveable act. So we piece our stories together, as Ondaatje has his characters do here, with photographs and stories and memory, or the absence thereof.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic!!!!!

When I saw Jaidee review this book today...
( Thank You, Jaidee).., I was bursting with
Cheer!!!

Why have people not read this book???
It's a slice of heaven. Much of it takes place
Napa, Calif. plus, "Divisadero", is a
famous street in SF .. where the one of the characters -(Anna), - grows up..,,so, much of
the location - of the storytelling is also in SF

I still own it, this nov..( treasure it) I remember 'pre-ordering' it. I had no idea I hadn't reviewed this.
I happen to love how Michael Ondaatje's writing makes me feel.
For those who don't know this author..
He wrote 'The English Patient'

It's a 'experience' reading Michael Onndaatje
Viva-la-melty!!

[da AL · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such gorgeous writing and beautiful thoughts! Yet... The book reads more like a set of short stories. The first half read fine. The author lays prose so profoundly honed that one could entertain oneself all day quoting passages from it. How could it be that given such promise, by the end I ceased to care about the characters and their stories? The audiobook reader did a good job, but by the end, even she seemed to acquire a dull groove of melancholy .

[Ryan Chapman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This might bear more fruit on a second reading, but as it is right now I would consider this a lesser Ondaatje than the brilliance displayed in Anil's Ghost and Booker Prize winner The English Patient. The first two-thirds of the text spans the young lives of a mixed family in Northern California and Nevada--the trio of sisters Anna and Claire with adopted farmhand (and John Grady Cole archetype) Coop. There's a predictable/inevitable running through of paradise attained and lost for this family involving a violent incident with their sketch of a father; the second part catches up with the trio as their lives spiral out into disparate/desparate conditions. Claire's a legal assistant in SF, Coop's a gambler in Tahoe and Vegas, and Anna's an archivist in the south of France researching the poet Lucien Segura.

The prose is still as revelatory as ever, but Ondaatje's subjects seem randomly chosen and weakly justified. Instead of following any of his characters' emotional arcs, he prefers to introduce new characters and extreme parallelism to indirectly address the themes of loss, memory, and sublimated desire.

Ondaatje makes an audacious formal experiment here, creating an ambiguous level of intertextuality for the last third of the novel--which at best helps us understand either Anna's approach to her past or the idea that these kind of things happen all the time. If Ondaatje were a more experimental novelist, in which the architecture of the book was foregrounded over his characters (see Cloud Atlas), this might work. Instead he wants to eat his cake and have it too: characters the reader emotionally identifies with but is fine abandoning every fifty pages for a new set of very similar characters. What we're left with is a clever hall of mirrors reflecting something beautiful, but incomplete.

[Miriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my god. Every once in a while and this happens like maybe once a year, I find, you read a book that is just the RIGHT BOOK at the right time. And this is it. Amazing. Gorgeous. It's hard to even say. Because there is also a roughness to it, to the characters that is almost gripping. That and, ta-dah it is so intricately structured. I love structures that I want to think about. And this is one. I want to just turn it over and read it again and again.

It also makes me want to go back and read The History of Love which was that most perfect book about two years ago. Sigh. Now I have to read something very silly otherwise I will be sorely disappointed. Everyone who hasn't read this one must read it right away. You will be awed and amazed.

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

With memory, with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways. We can circle time. A paragraph or an episode from another era will haunt us in the night, as the words of a stranger can. The awareness of a flag fluttering noisily within its colour brings me into a sudden blizzard in Petaluma. Just as a folded map places you beside another geography. So I find the lives of Coop and my sister and my father everywhere (I draw portraits of them everywhere), as they perhaps still concern themselves with my absence, wherever they are.

[Serenity · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just finished reading this book. I found it beautiful, haunting, and while at first I was dissatisfied with the loose and ultimately unresolved nature of the novel, I later decided to accept it and consequently appreciated it much more. Ondaatje is a poet as well as a novelist, and he lets poetry infuse his fiction richly. In this work, I feel that he has taken it one step further and stripped the events in the book to their essence, as in a poem. Read in that way, it no longer matters whether there is a tidy resolution to the collage of plots and characters. Although there is in fact resolution to the intertwining stories, the reader must decide it for herself, as in a poem.

The book takes on as one of its themes the very function that art performs for us as human beings, on a psychological level, and Ondaatje seems to be saying that we use it to protect ourselves from the life's harsher truths. As the voice of the narrator, Anna, tells us in the novel, "...this is where I learned that sometimes we enter art to to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us." It serves to "transcribe a substitution/ like the accidental folds of a scarf."

The characters in this book have much to hide from, and it is their lack of relief from the pain in their lives that resonates most deeply, in the end.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

To explain why I liked this book so much would be to give too much of its pleasures away. I will say, though, that the writing is beautiful and seems effortless. And that its themes are my favorites: memory, loss, connections that are made (but are too soon gone) and connections that are missed (in more than one sense of that word), never to be forgotten and seen everywhere.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinating unfolding of story, and simply heavenly writing. What a giant he is.

Divisadero begins as a Steinbeckian story of a small family in the Gold Rush country of California, circa around 1970--a rancher and his two daughters (his wife has died giving birth to one of them, and he left the hospital with another baby, whose mother has similarly died giving birth two her), plus the hired hand, who was taken in by the rancher when his own family was murdered, leaving him the sole survivor, and follows them (the natural daughter, Anna, is the only one with a first person point of view, the other two young people are told in third person.) through a terrible incident which explodes the family, into the separate lives of each of them as they grow older.

But Ondaatje's project is far different than Steinbeck's, which is to go further and further into the soil of that particular landscape and unfold it completely. Ondaatje's is about fragmentation, the fragmentation of life, and how people change one another as they enter each others' lives, if only for a little while. Anna, the first person narrator, becomes an archivist, and we find her in France, working on the papers of a mysterious minor writer, Lucien, and enter his life, and a family of 'travelers' he later encounters.

The book becomes more labyrinthine in the second part, and there are wonderful echoes between the various parts of the story, which is a delicate construction of extremely collapsable parts, which could come apart at any moment, but the voice--the author's voice--is so strong and knowledgeable and clearly capable of anything, we just ride right along with him.

The title, Divisadero, is the name of a street in San Francisco, which had been the dividing line between the city proper and the pastures of the Presidio, the military base. But it's a lot about people leaving on borders, of their own lives--people who have walked out of one life and are never fully integrated into another one. And the language here, the confidence of the way he puts these disparate elements together, lightly, so lightly, it makes reading the book a lot like sitting out on a summer night watching the Northern Lights. God knows what it "means", you just lie out and watch it dance.

[David Sasaki · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is not much I can write about Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero without echoing what all the other reviewers have already written: Ondaatje is a craftsman. His writing reveals decades of self-scrutiny, of each year wanting to say more with fewer words.

Divisadero is about love and the loss thereof. Love falls victim to the jealous wrath of a protective father, to drug addiction, to the minor details of our daily lives, and the greater mystery of the entropy of desire:

Lucien and his future wife left the curtained parlour and walked arm in arm for an hour or two along a road banked with poppies and into a marriage that created two daughters. 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.

Much of the novel takes place in the parts of California that even most Californians don't visit: Petaluma, Grass Valley, Santa Maria, Lake Tahoe. I have strong memories of all four places and Ondaatje's descriptions are not only apt; they also manage to capture the aesthetic of the 'other California', far from the bleached hair and blonde sand of Southern California and the cosmopolitanism of the Bay Area. I can only assume that his descriptions of provincial France are equally percipient.

There is also, it turns out, a link between this novel and Brazil. On the acknowledgements page of the book facing the back cover, Ondaajte writes:

The song 'Um Favor' (partially described on page 73) by Lupicinio Rodrigues in essence began this book.

Here is that partial description from page 73:

  
All of the world there must be people like us, Anna had said then, wounded in some way by falling in love - seemingly the most natural of acts.
  

  

  
He told her there was a song he no longer performed that had to do with all of that. It was about a woman who had risen from their bed in the middle of the night and left him. He would hear evidence of her in villages in the north, bust she would be gone by the time the rumour of her presence reached him. A song of endless searching, sung by this man who until then had seldom revealed himself. His tough fingers would tug the heart out of his guitar. He'd sing this song to those who had grown up with his music over the years, who were familiar with his skill at avoiding the limelight. He knew his reputation for shyness and guile, but now he conceded his scarred self to his friends. 'If any of you on your journeys see her - shout to me, whistle ...' he sang, and it became a habit for audiences to shout and whistle in response to those lines. There was nowhere for him to hide in such a song that had all of its doors and windows open, so that he could walk out of it artlessly, the antiphonal responses blending with him as though he were no longer on the stage.

And a related quote from Divisadero, originally muttered by Nietzche:

We have art so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

For your listening pleasure, here is Lupicinio Rodrigues' 'Um Favor'. (Right click, save as).

[emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

For a brief moment, I wondered if maybe I wasn't smart enough. Especially with all the comments on here saying things like "hey, this is just like life, because sometimes in real life narrative threads are lost and we don't really understand what happens."

Then I realized that that's a cheap argument. Because sometimes in real life, my cat poos on the floor and I step in it, but you can't argue that that is therefore deep because it is real. (I am not comparing this to cat poo. Honest.)

My book club read this, and we were pretty evenly split. Some people really liked the fogginess and the timeshifts. However, I was really frustrated by them, and especially by the book's mid-stream transition to being about a French novelist instead of a California sibling-ish trio. There are regular swaps in narrator, in time, in place, and few (if any) real transitions, and this is, in itself, not a huge problem.

However, there's a feeling of unfinishedness about it -- we leave characters at major life transition points, then don't bother to go back to learn what happened. Other characters show up and fade out. The characters themselves (I'm looking at you, Coop) seem as confused as we are -- they form temporary alliances without much real explanation or evidence of thought. Once again, some of my book club argued that this is because we don't always understand why other people do what they do, but I disagree: if we're being told, even via third person, a story that really does take place from a specific person's point of view, I don't want to just hear, again and again, that he is confused and unsettled and thinks he might have sex with her and is confused and where is he again? Unsatisfying and, ultimately, it lost me.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

A very disappointing read. A book that started off with a bang and then just faded in the middle. This fairly recent book was available for sale at the inflated price of $30 in Singapore bookshops so when it popped up in the American Club Library, I figured it was a smart, cost-efficient move. It was since buying the book would have been a waste.
The man can write. His account of a tragic incidents in the lives of two young girls and an orphaned hired hand on a northern California farm creates suspense and interest. But then it's like he starts over in the middle and begins writing another book about the life of an obscure French writer in another century. I missed the parallels and subtleties, failing to make connections. The prose hit the wall and I found my reading speed accelerating not out of interest but simply out of determination to finish it before the expiry date and return it to its rightful place on the shelves of the American Club library.

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is beautifully written. It is three disconnected stories in a mosaic. Each beautiful and complete in itself. The stories are linked to each other through a common character. I loved all the characters and was sad to leave them behind as the book moved on to the next story. In this way, it seemed to me to be a more of a collection of short stories sharing characters (similar to Franny and Zooey) than a novel.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe 4 +half—Ondaatje’s novels always seem somehow flawed, because they’re not like any other author’s novels. They leave me a little confused and not a little mystified—but a confusion stemming from awe and wonder. Ondaatje’s novels are poems—or, rather, collections of poems in prose of varied pace and pitch—and they can’t be read by the ‘normal’ rules of novel-reading. So, to call “Divisadero” a strange and beautiful concoction is just to say it’s a Michael Ondaatje novel. I say all this because if you’ve read any reviews of “Divisidero,” you’ll maybe have come away with the impression that the novel doesn’t work; its storylines and central characters are incomplete, its title cryptic and its narrative voice inconsistent. Yeah, it’s an Ondaatje novel. I’m here to say that if you know what I mean by this, or even if you don’t, it’s an amazing work. “’We have art,’ Nietzsche said, ‘so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth’”: This quote frames “Divisidero,” and in the pages between is the proof.

[Charlaralotte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well...When you've already written "The English Patient," it's hard to do much better. Unfortunately, it also seems to mean you don't get good editorial advice anymore.

This book has the makings of two good, separate books that would be tied together by a slim plot connection. As it is now, the two story lines are poorly integrated & feel forced.

I found the Cooper story dull, if only because I'm tired of Texas Hold 'Em poker & Las Vegas & America in general.

The Lucien story, on the other hand, is magnificent & I could read about him forever. Lucien's story is what kept me reading the book. Wonderful descriptions of clock repairers journeying through the French countryside to keep the clocks on time. Wonderful descriptions of the travelers.

Ondaatje should stick with writing about Europe. His style is much more appropriate for the continent. But if he's got to write about America, let's give him some help learning about more interesting things than poker.

[María Jesús · Rating 4 out of 5]

La espiral del tiempo

¡Qué difícil enfocar este libro! Y digo “enfocar” a propio intento porque el libro se resiste deliberadamente y, cuando crees que ya lo ves claro, de repente el enfoque cambia.

El título “Divisadero”es la mejor pista que se puede dar sobre esta obra. Por cierto, aquí he aprendido que divisar y dividir vienen a ser lo mismo o, más bien, se trata de una bifurcación desde un mismo origen: percibir un cambio, un matiz diferente, una fractura, los senderos que se bifurcan.

A menudo tenemos esta experiencia contemplando el paisaje desde un altozano que proporcione perspectiva plena, el símbolo en la novela es primero un depósito-torre de agua y luego un campanario. Es ésta una imagen excelente, porque además se trata de un campanario muy raro, con una estructura helicoidal que, tal y como dice el texto “a medida que se curvaba hacia arriba reflejaba todos los puntos cardinales del paisaje.”

Éste es para mí precisamente el sentido de la novela, que viene a ser un mapa tridimensional sobre los ejes de tiempo, espacio y familia.

Desde luego, esto no es lo que te esperas tras leer el texto de presentación de la solapa del libro, con esas sugerencias sobre el desarrollo de acontecimientos tras un hecho violento. Al principio nada desmiente que las cosas vayan a ir por ahí y, cuando empiezan a tomar otros derroteros, primero no entiendes y segundo te frustras. Sólo si perseveras captas la dimensión del panorama total.

Lo que más ayuda a superar la frustración en ese punto es que el lenguaje y el estilo ya te han atrapado; la poesía y los sorprendentes ángulos desde los que el autor contempla los detalles y su interpretación de esas percepciones, eso no es frecuente encontrarlo en otros libros.

Así que olvidaos de una concatenación ordenada y conclusiones nítidas, aquí lo que hay son destellos repetitivos, dispersos y deslumbrantes, sobre ciertos temas: la relación padre adoptivo/hijo; la de padre/hija; los secretos y traiciones entre hermanas; el amor desgraciado y el cumplido; el juego y el lumpen; los vínculos con la naturaleza; la soledad al final de la vida; la luz que anuncia una casa en la oscuridad de la noche.

[Laura Pursell Byrnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, and frustratingly unfulfilling...but I think that may be the author's point. The three storylines (filled with a multitude of engrossing characters) are divided by time and place but are supposed to intersect with one another symbolically, spiritually and metaphorically. Sound confusing? It is. It is also hard to articulate a cold hard opinion of this book; to do so lessens the effect of the book. Ondaatje's style is so lyrical, I'd find myself stopping and wanting to write down a phrase or image he desribed, so I wouldn't lose it. This is a novel written by a poet. A poet's take on the themes of loss, endless searching for connection and escape from the past. When you finish, because of the different time continuums that occupy the novel, you'll will want to go back to page 1 to fill in the missing pieces. It's hard to digest in one reading.

[b · Rating 1 out of 5]

as usual Ondaatje incorporates some beautiful imagery and there are some really outstanding sections of this book. However, on the whole, a disjointed piece with a whole lot of exposition and background description, but no sense of resolution to 2 out of 3 parts of the story. The good part, near the end, is just a back story about a character that is already dead and has almost nothing to do with the rest of the book at all. One of the very main characters is conveniently beaten to crap and has amnesia, and that's where his story ends. Come on! It's no wonder this book was passed over for prizes this year.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I closed the back cover of Divisadero I was left teary-eyed and unsettled, aching to know what happens to at least 2 of the key characters.

It's a story within a story, starting in 1970's Petaluma, CA- this story carries through to the present and weaves into a second that takes place in pre and post WWI rural (southwestern) France. The contemporary story ends without a literary resolution, but there is a sense of moving on and moving forward by the narrator. It's like life- what stories, conflicts, dreams, pains are ever really resolved? You just keep moving forward and learn to accept, love, maybe to forgive and learn to live with your pain and anger.

But I do wish I knew what happened next....

What amazes me about Ondaatje is how he is able to do so much in so little space- in 273 pages you are given rich, fully developed characters in settings that are as different as Reno's seedy gambling dens and a farmhouse deep in the French countryside, from characters as varied as a heroin-addicted Lake Tahoe cabaret singer and a writer serving as a medic in the fields of Verdun. He can give you an understanding of the intrigues of a modern professional gambler and 50 pages later you are living the life of a young, illiterate bride at the turn of the 20th century on the run with your much older husband, sleeping in barns and eating field onions to stay alive.

At any rate, a worthy read, a story I couldn't put down and as it came to a close, one I was sad to see end...

[Michael Livingston · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was completely overwhelmed by the first half of this book - the two key set pieces (the storm and the card game) are astonishing. Ondaatje writes with precision and power about the way that small decisions reverberate across people's lives - it's majestic. The second half detours into a story-within-a-story that, while enjoyable on its own merits, sucked away a bit of the momentum for me. But after ignoring Ondaatje based on poorly remembered opinions about movie of The English Patient, this has set me off to read a bunch more.

[Shawn Mooney (Shawn Breathes Books)]

Bailed on page 75. The opening scenario was gripping, but then one of the women is in France and seems to be falling in love with a Romani dude, and things turn cloyingly horrible. I refuse on principle to finish a book that has this sentence in it: "All over the world there must be people like us, Anna had said then, wounded in some way by falling in love— seemingly the most natural of acts." Just no. No! Nooooooo!

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Poetic Diptych

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.

[Alex Nye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Again, read this in tall narrow house in Nerja, Spain, overlooking Andalucean mountains. Had it on my table to read for months, and didn't get round to it. What I really loved about this book was the fact that Ondaatje is brave enough to let his fiction/story/narrative take him where he pleases. He doesn't feel constrained by some imaginary editor sitting on his shoulder saying critically 'you can't do that' or 'the publisher won't like that.' The beginning of the book opens with a painful love triangle, two sisters, a sort of cuckoo Heathcliff character, and a father who reacts violently to finding his daughter 'intimate' (I'm so polite!!!) with the boy. What is amazing is that the narrative then seems to leave these characters completely behind, and the busybody editor in me was saying 'but surely they would tell him - you are not in control of your narrative, you must get back on track'. And yet it worked. Two thirds of the way through you realised that he knew what he was doing after all; he was spreading the story thinly, and created not one but (I counted them) six different love triangles throughout the story, all gently linked simply by virtue of their symmetry. The stories were poles apart, in different countries and time periods, but it worked so beautifully. And that is what took my breath away - the realisation that you can forget the advice of the editor on your shoulder, causing too much restraint, and go with your instinct. The other thing which struck me was that the publishers obviously didn't know how to express this in a blurb, because the back cover only mentions the first love triangle, which is slightly misleading because the novel is actually much more than that. But then again, how do you express that in a blurb? Ondaatje is the only novelist I know who has the courage to keep you guessing, to make you realise that you have to be patient, that although he may seem to be going off on a tangent, there is an order of some kind - it's just not the one you expected, and it's certainly not the one that fits the usual conventions of what publishers expect of plot. But that's why I like him. He's unpredictable and gives me the courage to write how I want to write, without constraint.