Divisadero (Vintage International)
by Michael Ondaatje
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael OndaatjeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-04-22
ISBN: 0307279324
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Divisadero (Vintage International)
Book Review: We Live Permanently In The Recurrence Of Our Own Stories
Summary: 4 Stars
"I come from Divisadero Street," Anna tells us in Michael Ondaatje's fifth novel. "Divisadero, from the Spanish word for `division,' the street that at one time was the dividing line between San Francisco and the fields of the Presidio. Or it might derive from the word divisar, meaning `to gaze at something from a distance. " Erica Wagner
Michael Ondaatje has written exquisite prose and in the process has two novels in one. The first half of the book concerns a family in northern California. Anna and Claire, their father and Coop the orphan who was rescued from a family who were murdered. This convoluted group exposes their inner and outer selves and we come to understand that each of the children considers himself an orphan. The family is broken apart when love and lust intervene and the father takes justice into his own hands. Anna leaves to find her own world and Coop and Claire meet years later in Las Vegas under unusual circumstances.
In the second half of the book, Anna moves to Europe to research the life of French poet, Lucien Segura. She discovers that art and literature are what Europe is made of. Rafael, a gypsy guitarist comes into her life. Segura is also introduced and his entire life is shown within characters introdcuced by Rafael. None of this really goes anywhere. The novel became more disjointed than convincing. Ondaatje seems to want us to understand how we all 'live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories'. But this keeps recurring and loses the vitality of the first part of the novel for me. I was left feeling underwhelmed and wanted the story of Claire and Coop to be resolved.
Recommended. prisrob 01-03-09
Across the Great Divide: The Band and America
Literature and Film as Modern Mythology:
Summary of Divisadero (Vintage International)
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.
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
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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