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Divisadero

3.45 of 5 stars 3.45 · rating details · 6,430 ratings · 1,188 reviews

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,...more

Paperback, 288 pages

Published April 22nd 2008 by Vintage (first published 2007)

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Dec 26, 2008 Trish rated it 1 of 5 stars

Recommended to Trish by: Tash

Shelves: fiction, 2008-read

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 narrativ...more

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Jul 04, 2008 Serenity rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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...more

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Sep 27, 2007 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: recent-faves

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 f...more

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Jun 25, 2007 Ryan Chapman rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

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 fami...more

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Jul 17, 2009 Brad rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: canadian-lit

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 fee...more 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.(less)

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Jun 12, 2008 Emily rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

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 sin...more 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. (less)

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Jul 30, 2008 David rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to David by: Catherine

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...more 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).(less)

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Feb 01, 2008 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: recentlyread

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 beca...more

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Aug 07, 2007 Sara rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Sandy

Another outstanding offering from one of my favorite authors. The narrative travels back and forth in time, forging links between the past and the present. Ondaatje gives clues in the content as to the critical themes. "All over the world there must be people like us. . .wounded in some way by falling in love--seemingly the most natural of acts." "We live permananetly in the reoccurence of our own stories, whatever story we tell." ". . .what is most untrustowrthy about our natures and self-worth...more

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Aug 02, 2008 Charlaralotte rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2008

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 ot...more

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Feb 26, 2010 John rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: anyone French

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 su...more

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May 29, 2008 Miriam rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 Th...more

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Jun 30, 2008 Pat rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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.

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Nov 15, 2008 Janice rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: everyone

I very much enjoyed this book. But it was a little confusing toward the end. so I think it may need a second read. I came away with beautiful imagery of how people, specifically all the main characters fragment themselves. I think that the format of the book is also a story/metaphor of this fragmentation.

I'm not saying that any of his other books has straight forward, linear, single protagonist narration, but this literally felt like the narration was shattering towards the end into more and mo...more I very much enjoyed this book. But it was a little confusing toward the end. so I think it may need a second read. I came away with beautiful imagery of how people, specifically all the main characters fragment themselves. I think that the format of the book is also a story/metaphor of this fragmentation.

I'm not saying that any of his other books has straight forward, linear, single protagonist narration, but this literally felt like the narration was shattering towards the end into more and more characters and more and more time periods. I felt at the end I was not perfectly clear about whose story I was reading... which I believe was part of the point, but also not completely pleasant. It was a bit confusing.

I also did come away with the "moral" that we all see our own story everywhere. It was an interesting break in the narrative for me... literally bringing me out of the complex web stories to look at myself and why I read and question why I read and how I look at others. Do I constantly draw my story on others... over and over? of course I do. Which brings me to another theme.

Is this only because I have felt trauma? Then there is this theme of trauma and who has not felt trauma and in whose perspective is trauma? Yours. Not others. So any event that heavily/intensely impacted you and formed you negatively may be trauma. But there is also the perspective of keeping things in perspective; remembering the human connection and how your trauma is not perceived so by others.

It was also a study in how people get over trauma. The sudden break, the different persona, the contstantly taking different personas, risk taking drama seeking, running away, writing/art, seeking stories to absorb yourself in, being a work-a-holic, adopting new families, do-gooding, denial...

But this may only be my take on it because I am drawing my story over and over again. But regardless of all this, I did enjoy it. On a basic level, there are beautiful lines and imagery in it.
(less)

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Oct 22, 2008 Laura rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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...more

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May 11, 2010 Teresa rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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.

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Apr 13, 2011 Heather rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 21st-century, canadian-lit

I evidently haven't read a Work of Literature for a while. I want to talk about this book with someone who read it!! There was much I loved about each fragment of the story, but only the last part of the novel seemed "complete." I kept waiting to return to the original three characters, and was disappointed. I know this was deliberate on the author's part, but I want to figure out why!!!

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Feb 03, 2011 Tiziana rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A very interesting written book about love, loss and life. All I want to say about "Divisadero" is, read it. You won't be able to put it down.

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Mar 09, 2008 b borkent rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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...more

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Mar 12, 2009 Stephanie rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

MICHAEL Ondaatje is notorious for his non-linear – hence sometimes frustrating – narratives. Take his most commercially successful novel to date, The English Patient, which netted him the Booker Prize in 1992 and was made into an Oscar-winning movie in 1996.

Though the movie streamlined the plot, focusing on the love story of the titular character, the novel is actually more complex, interweaving the lives of four characters whose stories do not obviously relate to each other, while throwing in a...more

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Dec 30, 2008 Eric rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It appears as if the last novel I'll complete this year has turned out to be the best one of the year. It used to be that my life would stop with the appearance of a new Kundera novel, but now that distinction belongs to Ondaatje. Divisadero is like another English Patient, but I mean this in the best sense: it's not a replica of that earlier novel, but a continuation and enlargement of its central themes (nomadism, personal and historical wounds, blurred boundaries between past and present and...more

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Nov 22, 2008 Jeanne rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I love to read Michael Ondaatje. The English Patient is one of my all time favorite reading experiences. Coming Through Slaughter made me see New Orleans through a new set of eyes. Anil's Ghost brought human rights to the fore in my mind for the first time. And Divisadero linked me to the region of France that gives me my Frenchness. I always enter another world and smell it as I inhale the words on each page. And this was how I felt for most of this book.

He divided his book in half, however, w...more

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Mar 16, 2013 Susan Meiklejohn rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I first became aware of Michael Ondaatje because of his excellent reviews in the New York Review of Books, and then through a preface to another novel (by the Hungarian Sandor Marai, I think). I remember reading it and thinking -- this is such an usually beautiful preface, how can the book measure up? It was a great book, yet Onjaatje's small contribution out-shown it.

I looked in my bookshelves, and there were two(!) copies of his "The English Patient." (I never say the movie). I opened one and...more

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Mar 08, 2013 Tony rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

While I enjoy this author, I do not feel this is his greatest work, nor his "most accessible", despite whatever accolades say so. I enjoyed the first third of this novel, with the development of Anna, Claire, Coop, and their father. I enjoyed following these characters through growth and separation from one another. The second third of the book does not completely abandon them, but instead focuses exclusively on Anna and her current life in Europe, including a rather lackadaisical romance betwee...more

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Nov 02, 2012 Robert rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero is a novel worth reading for many reasons, and although it’s not a flawless book, as I’ll discuss later, that may even be one of the reasons to read it.
The genius of the book is Ondaatje’s ability to isolate his splendid prose on intriguing characters and settings in such a way that sentence by sentence you feel the presence of a passionate soul. He writes with poetic skill, wisdom, humor, and a startling eye for compelling details.
As a friend said to me not long...more Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero is a novel worth reading for many reasons, and although it’s not a flawless book, as I’ll discuss later, that may even be one of the reasons to read it.
The genius of the book is Ondaatje’s ability to isolate his splendid prose on intriguing characters and settings in such a way that sentence by sentence you feel the presence of a passionate soul. He writes with poetic skill, wisdom, humor, and a startling eye for compelling details.
As a friend said to me not long ago, “Why can’t some books simply be valued because they are so well-written that you don’t really care about the plot?” This is that kind of book.
The plot, such as it is, revolves around a California family patched together by a single man who raises three unrelated children on his farm. Those three children, two girls who grow up as sisters and a boy who is something of an outlier, are the core characters in the novel.
Cooper is what Jung would call a “sensate.” He builds, he touches things, he becomes a master poker player because he’s so good at cheating when he deals.
Anna is more of an introvert who becomes a literary scholar whose research, somewhat weirdly, takes over the final portions of the novel.
Claire is a combination figure, conventional during the week, a wild wanderer on the weekends.
They care about one another to the point of interchangeability as children, but Ondaatje presses on them hard as they grow up...and away from one another.
At a few points in the narrative, physical violence is the propulsive force--ugly and somewhat unreal. Grudges are formed fast and held forever. Angry spirits lurking in the casinos of Lake Tahoe, for example, have long memories and never die. At other points, the story shifts to Anna’s literary and historical researches in France. This setting and its characters are as convincing as those in California, but they’re different, very different.
A figure who is foundational and briefly pivotal, the father, is essentially not developed beyond a few protective instincts and a capacity for destructive rage, however, and that raises the question of whether somewhere in Anna’s extended research into the French writer Lucien Segura we can pinpoint an analogue to the undeveloped father...or some point for point analogy between Segura’s tale and that of the three children.
I’m not sure that we can. This is a novel that comes in chunks, perhaps as befits its name. One thing is divided from another. The point is that nothing holds together. Everything, as Yeats wrote, flies apart.
A conventional commercially oriented novel this diffuse would be pushed aside or sent back for rewriting to straighten it out, as in: “Let’s get the sequences, motivations, connections, and so forth squared away. Don’t demand so much of readers! They’re busy and often tired when they settle down with a book. How are they supposed to know if Lucien Segura was a real man, or an invention? What’s this extended riff on diphtheria and World War I doing in here? I thought we were doing a stripped down, beat ‘em up, druggy kind of book...or a book where someone says, ‘Hey, let’s put things back together with Dad...point out the Segura in him...or connect this strange figure Raphael in France to Cooper learning to cheat at cards in Nevada.’”
But this isn’t a conventional, commercially oriented novel. It’s a novel you read slowly and forgivingly because passionately imagined reality is more intense and better than every day reality. Of course there are distortions and non sequiturs, but who cares? Perhaps you really can’t have the sweetness and lyricism Ondaatje brings to the page and not face flaws. The flaws may be, in fact, what frees his imagination and lets his pen flow.
One more point I’m curious about. Ondaatje adds a two page “Acknowledgements” after the novel is over. He thanks dozens of people, some for obvious reasons, others for not so obvious reasons. He also cites a number of fairly obscure, technical books that helped him address some of the problems he wanted to explore in this novel. As wide-ranging and daring as he is, he still seems, as a craftsman, deeply wedded to getting facts about birds, unusual quotes, and the raw breath of the Nevada desert just right. I have no problem with that; generosity is a virtue; but ultimately this is a rich work of a singular imagination, and it’s odd how tied he still feels to the corroboration and stimulation found in source material and friends.No one really can take much credit for what Ondaatje writes except himself.(less)

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Sep 04, 2012 Steven rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm torn whether or not it's recommendable.

The writing itself is splendid, truly. Each sentence conveys complexities effortlessly - a more poetic Hemingway style if I ever read one. The book is immersive and creates for itself an enjoyable aura. The author's linguistic dexterity makes for a very easy and engaging read, and this dexterity is what prevents evocative scenes from becoming overly-sentimentalized ones.

The thing is, for me, the story is a bit too self-involved. As in, once leaving it,...more I'm torn whether or not it's recommendable.

The writing itself is splendid, truly. Each sentence conveys complexities effortlessly - a more poetic Hemingway style if I ever read one. The book is immersive and creates for itself an enjoyable aura. The author's linguistic dexterity makes for a very easy and engaging read, and this dexterity is what prevents evocative scenes from becoming overly-sentimentalized ones.

The thing is, for me, the story is a bit too self-involved. As in, once leaving it, I don't know if there's anything lasting about it, or even any of the characters really. I think one of the biggest problems is that in writing such strong female voices, most of the male characters are reduced to sulking caricatures. All the men have issues expressing themselves, and that's such a well-worn archetype (the rugged/aloof loner) that I find it difficult to reconcile with the otherwise-adept story-telling.

Also, the structure was a bit unfulfilling for me. The first half of the book deals with contemporary time, whereas the second is mostly a retrospective dealing with the lives of characters who have relatively minor influences on the characters from the first half. Most of the events in the second half revolve around an obscure French writer. I can see at least a few of the over-arching themes (all life is repetition of similar circumstances/emotions/etc., no matter how remote the connections between people seem, and the chaos theory of social interaction - how relatively tiny or spontaneous decisions of characters can shape future actions) and maybe I am not giving enough credit for this aspect of the work. But the 1, 2 structure of the book felt like an overly formalized way to touch on those particular themes. I would've liked it much better if the story had had these interesting historical anecdotes interspersed throughout (a la, 'Everything Is Illuminated') instead of reading like a high-school term paper. Thesis/antithesis. Ho-hum.

More to follow, as I suspect my impression may change after having had a little more time to digest this one ... (less)

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Jul 30, 2012 Alex Nye rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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...more 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.(less)

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May 08, 2012 Carl Brush rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I was well into Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje’s very fine latest work, thinking about how appropriate the title was, remembering that Divisadero (Sp. for “divided”) Street in San Francisco once was a major dividing line in the city but unable to remember what it separated. I’d have to look it up, I thought, to write this blog. Then Ondaatje did it for me and added another dimension as well. The street was the border between the city and the fields of the presidio, between the civilians and the so...more I was well into Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje’s very fine latest work, thinking about how appropriate the title was, remembering that Divisadero (Sp. for “divided”) Street in San Francisco once was a major dividing line in the city but unable to remember what it separated. I’d have to look it up, I thought, to write this blog. Then Ondaatje did it for me and added another dimension as well. The street was the border between the city and the fields of the presidio, between the civilians and the soldiers. There’s also a variation of the Spanish word that means to look out or gaze, and there’s a Divisadero Heights near the street, which I didn’t know about. So in addition to the pain of separation which infuses the book, there’s also a sense of peering into the future and the past. It’s a perfect metaphor for the characters and action in this complex, poetic novel.
The story begins as one of Divisadero become united. In Northern California in the 70’s a cobbled-together family consisting of a father, his daughter, whose mother died in childbirth, a foundling girl whose mother also died in childbirth on the same day as the daughter, and an orphaned boy boy from a nearby farm. The family creates a viable, if rather isolated and odd, existence in the hills outside Petaluma. Then, Anna at 16 and Cooper (Coop) at 20 begin their affair. Dad catches them. There’s graphic and ugly violence, and thus begins the Divisadero that is the true focus of the book.
Years later, we find Claire (the “adopted” daughter) in and around Petaluma/San Francisco, Coop in Vegas as a card sharp, and Anna in France working on a biography of an obscure writer. Except the facts behind those facts are deeper. Anna is living and working in the very house of the writer she’s studying and having an affair with a man who lives nearby and, when he was a boy, knew the writer. Coop is a gambler who’s able to walk away from a card game. Claire works for a public defender, an investigator analogous to, but not at all identical to Anna’s wandering through the past lives of her writer. She’s in some ways a caretaker for both her boss, prone to DUI, and her father, with whom she spends weekends.
All the characters, then, are on the periphery of their personal worlds, none wholly invested in any reality. And there are now two or three novels. The story of Anna in France is not merely an account of her life separate from her family. It becomes the story of her writer, intertwined with the story of her lover, and she becomes at some point one of the writer-narrators telling the other two stories. Ondaatje obviously means the California story to parallel the French one. There is the haunting image of a blue table, for example. And intertwined metaphors of maps and lives and plenteous confusion between reality, illusion, past, and present. In one reading, I could not quite tie the two worlds together to my satisfaction. It was as if I were reading not just about parallel lives on the same planet, but lives in some kind of parallel universe. But that’s on me. Not smart enough. And mostly I didn’t mind. As one reviewer put it, reading Ondaatje’s prose is like listening to music. It’s an experience that often needs no reference point outside itself to convey great satisfaction and meaning.
I’ve read neither of Ondaatje’s two other celebrated works--The English Patient (saw the movie, though, if that counts) nor Anil’s Ghost--but they’ve gone on my list. After reading Junot Diaz, I’ve now hit on Michael Ondaatje. And Obama is President. And it’s turning into a great year. (less)

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Nov 30, 2011 Noah rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I recently had the chance to see Ondaatje live in conversation with Michael Chabon in San Francisco, and as a result became determined to read more of Ondaatje's work. The only other work by Ondaatje I had read was Running in the Family, which I greatly enjoyed. Also, having gained insight into Ondaatje's writing process through his conversation with Chabon, I became more and more determined to expand my Ondaatje reading.

I chose Divisadero as an entry point because it a) featured the Bay Area,...more

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Jul 29, 2011 Laurie added it · review of another edition

Divisadero is a haunting, elusive book about several solitary people living in the aftermath of great loss and pain. A family is broken apart by a single unforgiveable event. A woman changes her identity. A man goes to prison, and then emerges only to become a soldier, where his violent temper is presumably an asset. The story is told by multiple narrators, with multiple points of view, and not in a linear order. The strongest portions tell of the life of a French writer, who is at times reminis...more

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About Michael Ondaatje

He was born to a Burgher family of Dutch-Tamil-Sinhalese-Portuguese origin. He moved to England with his mother in 1954. After relocating to Canada in 1962, Ondaatje became a Canadian citizen. Ondaatje studied for a time at Bishops College School and Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Quebec, but moved to Toronto and received his BA from the University of Toronto and his MA from Queen's Universit...more

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Quotes from Divisadero

“For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.” — 48 people liked it

“...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.” — 39 people liked it

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