Product Description

From the celebrated author of The English Patient and Anil's Ghost comes a remarkable, intimate novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time.

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. Divisadero takes us from San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada's casinos and eventually to the landscape of southern France. As the narrative moves back and forth through time and place, we find each of the characters trying to find some foothold in a present shadowed by the past.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #148589 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-22
• Released on: 2008-04-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 273 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307279323
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

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

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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

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From Publishers Weekly
Ondaatje's oddly structured but emotionally riveting fifth novel opens in the Northern California of the 1970s. Anna, who is 16 and whose mother died in childbirth, has formed a serene makeshift family with her same-age adopted sister, Claire, and a taciturn farmhand, Coop, 20. But when the girls' father, otherwise a ghostly presence, finds Anna having sex with Coop and beats him brutally, Coop leaves the farm, drawing on a cardsharp's skills to make an itinerant living as a poker player. A chance meeting years later reunites him with Claire. Runaway teen Anna, scarred by her father's savage reaction, resurfaces as an adult in a rural French village, researching the life of a Gallic author, Jean Segura, who lived and died in the house where she has settled. The novel here bifurcates, veering almost a century into the past to recount Segura's life before WWI, leaving the stories of Coop, Claire and Anna enigmatically unresolved. The dreamlike Segura novella, juxtaposed with the longer opening section, will challenge readers to uncover subtle but explosive links between past and present. Ondaatje's first fiction in six years lacks the gut punch of Anil's Ghost and the harrowing meditation on brutality that marked The English Patient, but delivers his trademark seductive prose, quixotic characters and psychological intricacy. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Jeff Turrentine

What an unusual, and unusually rich, experience it is to read Divisadero, the new novel by Michael Ondaatje -- like going for a walk in a familiar neck of the woods, getting lost and then discovering an entirely new neck of woods filled with unknown wonders. The title provides only the subtlest of clues: It's the name of the San Francisco street on which one character, Anna, lives. Within the story, it's mere trivia; none of the novel's action takes place there, and Anna herself only mentions her street in passing. But Ondaatje apparently loves what that word connotes -- a line between two realms, separating them but also hinging them. And how appropriate, for Divisadero is ultimately a story about two worlds divided by decades and oceans, but connected by clarion, undiminishable echoes.

Though Ondaatje is best known as the author of 1992's The English Patient, which went from being a well-regarded literary novel to a worldwide multimedia phenomenon, it's worth noting that he began his career as a poet. Surely the poet in him also appreciates all the anagrams (or near-anagrams) tucked into his new book's title: not just "divide," but also "desire," "eros" and "savior" -- words with particular resonance in the lives of Anna, Claire and Coop, the trio of quasi-siblings who grow up together in California before going their separate ways. Years after the three are forced to say an abrupt and violent goodbye, Anna's studies take her to an abandoned French farmhouse, the onetime home of a World War I-era writer whose work has become a focus of her scholarship. As she reconstructs the writer's life (with help from a lover who once knew him), Anna can't help but be struck by the remarkable similarities between his world and her own.

As the story begins, Anna is living on a Petaluma farm with her widowed father; with Coop, an older orphan boy taken in by her parents when her mother was still alive; and with Claire, another orphan who is born at the same time as Anna and who is raised, more or less, as Anna's sister. Without the bond of blood to enforce the incest taboo, it's pretty clear where we're headed, especially given Coop's penchant for rugged, shirtless, outdoor work and the teenage girls' penchant for watching him as he swings a hammer or dives into a water tank to patch a leak. The question isn't if something will happen but rather when Coop will take "one step beyond the intimacy that was handed to him," and with which of his almost-sisters.

The inevitable occurs, and when the father learns of it, this improvised family is broken apart. Coop, who is lucky to escape with his life, becomes a professional gambler, a career choice well-suited to his solitary ways and taciturn personality. Claire goes to work as an investigator for a public defender's office, where she specializes in discovering the presence of mitigating circumstances -- another perfect fit for a woman still trying to understand the act of violence that truncated her childhood. Which leaves Anna, who never looked back after running away from home at 16, but who now finds herself encountering, in the life of her biographical subject, the same themes and events that have shaped her own.

Ondaatje spends more than half of this novel following these three, interlacing their stories, expertly shifting into different voices and tenses, disrupting the conventional chronology with the easy grace that has become his hallmark. And then he does something very unconventional indeed. Two-thirds of the way through Divisadero, he abandons his characters. Or at least he seems to, as he picks up the trail of Lucien Segura, the French writer whose life and work have so intrigued Anna. And just like that, we cross the dividing line from one world into the next, with little understanding -- at first -- as to how Segura's tale could possibly mesh with all that has come before it.

The two stories do mesh, of course, but without the aid of any awkward contrivances or outlandish coincidences. There are no a-ha! moments, no disclosures of concealed ancestry or secret connective history. Instead, Ondaatje is coaxing us to acknowledge the universality of those themes hiding there inside his title -- desire, the ways we save one another and the debts we owe to those who save us -- and to see how they link all of us, irrespective of our backgrounds or circumstances or eras. Anna, who grew up with a brother who wasn't exactly her brother and a sister who wasn't exactly her sister, now discovers that she has a twin in the long-dead Segura, whose secrets and passions uncannily mirror her own. By the end of this hauntingly beautiful story, the reader will feel just as closely connected to the both of them.

And along the way, what wonderfully precise language we're treated to. A boy observing the night sky with his mother, drunk on starlight: "It was when he felt most clearly that there was no distinction between himself and what was beyond him -- a tree's sigh or his mother's song, could, it seemed, have been generated by his body. Just as whatever gesture he made was an act performed by the world around him." A married man who can't stop thinking about another woman, also married, who lives in the next farmhouse over: "He noticed the square of a lit window on the slope of the hill. There was a tightrope between the two farms, and below it an abyss."

There are countless more examples of perfect phrasing in Divisadero, and those who spend time within its pages will discover even more proof -- not that they needed it -- of Michael Ondaatje's peerlessness as a storyteller and poet.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Customer Reviews

'Divisadero' deserves the Booker Prize.
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.

A Satisfying Literary Tale of Two Broken Families, A Century Apart
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.

Disappointing
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.