<![CDATA[Divisadero]]>

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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 <hr size="1">Guest Reviewer: Jhumpa Lahiri <img src="http://images.amazon.com//images/P/0618733965.01.SWATCHXX.jpg" border="0" align="left">Jhumpa Lahiri was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, as well as the PEN/Hemingway Award for her mesmirizing 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 <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" />

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Divisadero

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1 5 false false Wed Dec 24 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Thu Dec 04 14:14:18 -0800 2008 Fri Dec 26 10:45:43 -0800 2008 more...]]> 4 4 false false Fri Jul 04 13:11:30 -0700 2008 Mon Jun 30 20:52:11 -0700 2008 Fri Jul 04 13:11:30 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 7 false false Sat Sep 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Mon Sep 17 10:55:21 -0700 2007 Thu Sep 27 05:38:20 -0700 2007 more...]]> 3 4 false false Fri Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Sun Jun 03 23:12:07 -0700 2007 Mon Jun 25 21:15:18 -0700 2007 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 ...more...]]> 4 5 false false Fri Jul 17 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Thu Jul 09 07:21:40 -0700 2009 Fri Jul 17 22:01:52 -0700 2009 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...more...]]> 5 3 false false Sun Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Apr 28 07:47:29 -0700 2008 Thu Jun 12 12:55:45 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 3 false false Mon Jul 28 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Fri Jul 18 07:59:38 -0700 2008 Wed Jul 30 09:23:53 -0700 2008 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 l...more...]]> 5 2 false false Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Tue Jan 01 11:19:40 -0800 2008 Fri Feb 01 17:20:36 -0800 2008 more...]]> 4 2 false false Wed Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Sat Jul 14 15:28:51 -0700 2007 Tue Aug 07 12:28:58 -0700 2007 more...]]> 3 2 false false Thu Jul 31 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sat Aug 02 10:15:26 -0700 2008 Sat Aug 02 10:49:02 -0700 2008
This book has the makings of two good, separate books that would be tied together by a slim plot connection. A...more...]]> 1 2 false false Tue Apr 15 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Fri Apr 25 17:32:31 -0700 2008 Fri Apr 25 17:50:00 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 2 false false Thu May 29 12:36:21 -0700 2008 Thu Jan 31 06:18:59 -0800 2008 Thu May 29 12:36:21 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 2 true false Mon Jun 30 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun Jun 22 07:32:54 -0700 2008 Mon Jun 30 18:31:23 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 1 false false Sat Nov 15 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Mon Jun 09 02:20:17 -0700 2008 Sat Nov 15 02:53:15 -0800 2008 more...]]> 4 1 false false Wed Oct 22 13:11:06 -0700 2008 Wed Oct 22 13:26:54 -0700 2008 more...]]> 1 1 false false Sun Mar 09 16:49:15 -0700 2008 Sat Feb 02 09:02:33 -0800 2008 Sun Mar 09 16:48:57 -0700 2008 more...]]> 2 0 false false Sun Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Thu Mar 12 04:54:43 -0700 2009 Thu Mar 12 04:57:35 -0700 2009
Though the movie streamli...more...]]> 3 0 false false Fri Feb 27 17:13:42 -0800 2009 Fri Feb 27 17:25:37 -0800 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Mon Dec 22 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Tue Dec 30 14:05:30 -0800 2008 Tue Dec 30 14:24:13 -0800 2008 Divisadero is like another English Patient, but I mean this in the be...more...]]> 3 0 false false Tue Nov 18 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Sat Nov 22 08:24:14 -0800 2008 Sat Nov 22 08:33:39 -0800 2008 more...]]>