DIVISADERO ONSTAGE

MIchael Ondaatje's novel Divisadero is headed to a Canadian stage.

"When I finished the book, I always imagined it as having a public voice in some way, so it wasn't a book read mentally, but heard as well," Ondaatje recalls, although the writer whose 1992 Booker-winning novel The English Patient was turned into an Oscar-winning movie says he can't imagine Divisadero as a film. "I heard Justin Rutledge at an event, and just the way he was playing and singing, I thought: Coop – who was a very silent character in the book. He could be Coop, and Coop could be represented musically."