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: #1693 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-22
• Released on: 2008-04-22
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.com
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
Davis (American Splendor) reads Ondaatje's puzzle of a novel delicately, as if hesitant to jostle a single piece out of place. Often playing emotionally frazzled characters on screen, Davis is far more understated here in offering up Ondaatje's hybrid narrative—one that goes from 1970s San Francisco to early 20th-century France, linking past and present with loose tendrils of memory and history. She does a fine job with the tricky French names and nomenclature, and puts her natural gifts as an actor to good use with her subtle, understated, well-oiled reading. Davis still sounds as no-nonsense as ever, but her skilled reading offers a good deal more patience and tenderness than her often-testy characters do.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
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

"Everything is collage"
Michael Ondaatje writes in his new novel, "[T]here is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross." At one level "Divisadero" is such a collage, spreading scenarios across more than one hundred years and several continents. Initially seemingly disconnected events and individual stories are nevertheless intertwined in some way. They converge around Anna, the anchor in the narrative who brings the different segments together. At another level, Ondaatje's exquisitely written novel is about recurring themes of identity, love, loss and pain, and the potentially healing power of passing time and remembrance. Completely absorbing, I found it deeply moving and enriching. A book to be read more than once to be fully appreciated in composition and content.

A certain mystique surrounds the title; its varied possible interpretations find their echo in the structure of the novel and the personal histories of the protagonists. According to Anna "divisadero" means "to divide" and also "to gaze at from afar". A pivotal experience at some point in each protagonist's life has broken its continuity, resulting in a major change or split in their life from then on. Some inner consolidation may be achieved as time allows for re-examination of the past and discovering of similarities in others. Ondaatje uses different voices and perspectives to bring to the reader more than one linear narrative. The novel's structure also reminded me of a musical composition: across the distinct 'movements' themes are nonetheless recurring, and innocuous motifs, such as the shards of glass, can take on symbolic character in their repetition; parallels in the protagonists' lives are slowly revealed and linkages established. With each reiteration, new aspects of the story are introduced for the reader to explore.

The actual plot can be summarized very quickly. It is evidently not Ondaatje's primary motivation for writing "Divisadero". His interest clearly lies in exploring the essence of his characters, their feelings and sensuality, their interaction with others and their physical environments and finally, their ability to recover (or not) from deep trauma. A widower raises his daughter, Anna, and adopts an orphan girl, Claire, born on the same day, as a pseudo twin sister for her. Coop, son of a local farm hand, also an orphan, is added to the small family. When the girls are sixteen, a devastating event abruptly ends the until then mostly idyllic life in rural northern California. They break apart, each coping in a different way with what they experienced. "The raw truth of an incident never ends" Anna reflects later on. Claire's and Coop's stories are interleafed with Anna's. Coop's character, in particular, is expertly drawn, as he lives out the challenges of his youth.

We meet "Anna" again, living in Southern France, as a biographer, researching the life of Lucien Seguro, a little known author who lived there nearly a century ago. She has since shed her name and former identity. Her life becomes indirectly linked to the writer she studies, in part through Rafael, who was connected to Lucien in a similar vein that Coop was connected to Anna's family. While the narrative switches to Seguro's life, his coming of age and the people surrounding him, we are led to make connections, see parallels. Ondaatje's sensitive exploration of the growing fondness between Lucien and his young neighbour, Marie-Neige, is one of the most touching and haunting love stories one can imagine. Comparisons are invited between Anna's life and Lucien's. At every stage, though, Ondaatje leaves us guessing who the narrator is. Is everything written by Anna? Nietzsche's "We have art, so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth", is initially introduced by Anna on page one of the novel, and later repeated. While we are receiving signals that Anna's recollections may not be necessarily the only version of the truth, Ondaatje leaves the question open to interpretation. In a wider sense, encompassing the whole novel, there are hints of an "invented life" - to make it less painful and to come to terms with her abandonment of her sister and Coop in a time of crisis. The beginning is in the end completing the collage created. [Friederike Knabe]

Master of his Craft
Michael Ondaatje is an excellent writer and story teller, and this book displays all of his skills. The use of common elements and themes throughout this book, which is really about five short stories knitted together with the frailest of threads. I suppose there are lessons of life, about priorities and gaps that are never closed or closed too late in our lives, often with severe results. The book moves along quickly and keeping the characters straight can be a chore, but if one takes the time they will be rewarded, this is a gem.

Relevant and enjoyable
As someone familiar with Divisadero street, but not at all familiar with the wanderings of Northern California, I really enjoyed this book. Some of the tales - just what happened - remain unfinished - but at the same time it leaves you feeling that the characters are complete.

I have always enjoyed this author. His tales of Sri Lanka and overcoming conflict are a pleasure to read.