| | Divisadero |  | Author: Michael Ondaatje
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  74 reviews
Sales Rank: 1184168
Media: Paperback
ISBN: 0739491059
EAN: 9780739491058
ASIN: 2764605358
Publication Date: 2007
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 A Satisfying Literary Tale of Two Broken Families, A Century Apart June 2, 2007
82 out of 96 found this review helpful
Divisadero, one of Michael Ondaatje's characters helpfully informs us, is a street in San Francisco, a former dividing line between the city and the open area of the Presidio. Then again, the character tells us, perhaps the name comes from the Spanish divisar, meaing to "gaze at something from a distance," from a vantage point where one can see far. While the actual street and the city of San Francisco have little significance to the story, both of these inferred meanings come into play as Ondaatje unwinds two parallel tales, nearly a century apart, of natural and acquired families, of passions and betrayals and deaths, and of orphaned children and equally abandoned parents.
DIVISADERO, the book, offers two intertwined stories, connected through the peculiar literary researches of one of the modern characters named Anna. Anna specializes in writing biographies of history's secondary characters, the unkown individuals who orbit the lives of the famous. She has chosen for her latest subject an obscure, one-eyed, turn-of-the-century French poet named Lucien Segura. Anna's explorations lead her to occupy the last house where Segura lived. While there, she meets and interviews Segura's semi-adopted son Rafael, ultimately engaging him in a sexual affair.
In a dreamlike recounting of Segura's life that appears meant to be viewed as Anna's biographical voice, we later learn that Lucien was more successful as the anonymous author of a series of light escapist fictions based on his romantic imaginings of a lost love than he was as a poet. Ondaatje launches into three more intertwined narratives centered on Segura - his lifelong enamoration with his childhood neighbor Marie-Neige and her husband Roman, his encapsulation of Marie-Neige and Roman's lives into his highly popular light fictions, and his relationship in later years with Rafael and his gypsy parents Aria and Liebard/Astolphe. Segura's frustrations over his lost childhood infatuation with Marie-Neige and his inadvertent sighting of his pregnant daughter in flagrante delicto in an outdoor shower with his second daughter's fiance lead him to abandon his wife and family for life as a recluse. Gradually, of course, his life reopens in its new surroundings and he befriends Rafael's itinerant family, taking young Rafael under his literary wing. When Rafael's family eventually decides to pull up stakes and head north following the Great War, Segura is effectively orphaned, left in solitude to end his life in a romantically poetic fashion.
Early on in the book, Ondaatje informs us that "the past was a strange inheritance that fell upside down into one's life like an image through a camera obscura." Not long after, Anna describes herself as the "person who discovers subtexts in history and art, where the spiralling among a handful of strangers tangles into a story." So naturally, Anna's life story twists like a DNA strand around Segura's, forming a complementary double helix. Anna we learn early in the novel has two "acquired" siblings, a false twin named Claire (an orphan) whom Anna's father adopts at the same time Anna was born, her mother having passed away in childbirth. The two girls share an older "false brother" named Coop, another unofficial adoptee, a farmhand whose parents had been murdered in his early youth. When Anna's father later discovers his 15-year-old daughter in flagrante delicto with Coop, he beats the young man nearly senseless and causes Anna to nearly kill her father with a shard of glass (paralleling Segura's loss of eyesight from the shattered glass of a window in his youth). Coop disappears, as does Anna, and the family unit is largely shattered. Coop, by far DIVISADERO's most engaging character, elevates his fanciful dreams of youth - striking it rich while panning for gold - into a career as a cardsharp. Claire, later working for the San Francisco D.A.'s office, unexpectedly runs into Coop in Lake Tahoe just as he endures another physical beating and his life takes a dramatic turn for the worse.
Some readers may indeed be taken by Ondaatje's impeccable prose, which gravitates from an eerily Cormac McCarthy-like voice in Coop's story to a faintly 19th Century European voice in Segura's tale. Others may be put off by the abrupt dropping of Claire and Coop's story - even Anna's story more or less fades into Segura's denoument. Parallels, of course, abound in the two story lines, from One-Eyed Jacques alluding to Coop's gambling and Coop's gambling partner The Dauphin referring to French royal lineage to Claire's tending to the damaged Coop as Segura imagines he tends to the dying Marie. In the end, however, Ondaatje tells us that life goes on, that successive generations unintentionally retell the same stories and interpret the past and their own histories in the light of one another. In DIVISADERO's closing scene over the silent lake, he writes, "Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible." Humans are little different, he is telling us.
 Disappointing June 12, 2007
39 out of 46 found this review helpful
There's much to enjoy in this new Ondaatje novel--all his usual gifts are on display--but I was disappointed. First, it seems too many serious writers these days are obsessed with writing itself as a metaphor for life and all its existential complexity. Ondaatje tries to include the "world" in his tortured literary effort--e.g., clunky references to the two Gulf Wars--but in the end the novel and its concerns feel terribly self-involved and self-referential, like he's finally given into a private world just as his characters Lucien Segura, Rafael, and Anna have done. Art as an escape from truth. Nietzsche deserves a better interpretation! Second, I found it needlessly confusing. I know we're not supposed to admit this -- we're supposed to pretend that it all makes sense--but does it? Early on Anna recounts a shared memory in the barn with her sister Claire. She says that "even now" they remember it differently. When is even now? She runs away from home and never goes back as far as we know, so when do she and Anna get together and compare memories? Also, how can her telling of Lucien's life story contain resonances with Coop's life after she left, a life of which she knows nothing? Are we to believe in magic here, or are we to believe that the family at some point reunites?
Don't get me wrong, the book is a pleasurable serious read. I read it in one sitting (one long plane ride). But it became increasingly disappointing as it went on. He refuses to tell a straight story--I get it--but the (perhaps) unintended effect of his narrative stubbornness is that as the book went on I wanted basically one thing: to know what happened to Coop, whom he abandons at mid-book. You can't just create a character and a story line as compelling as this one and then throw it away as if it started to smell bad to you. It smacks of an author who might disdain his own readers.
And, finally, I felt the book was haunted by Ian McEwan's superior Atonement. This may be cruel, but this book felt like a convoluted knock-off of it.
Makes me glad I love reading July 11, 2007
29 out of 34 found this review helpful
A synopsis of this book cannot do it justice. Enough reviews have contained content, so I will only add that this is a book that made me glad that I love reading so. It is a book that is so absorbing, it blocks out externals -- attention remains focussed even in noisy cafes. Each section could stand alone as a novella in itself, but as an integrated whole, it is an astounding reading experience.
Facing "the raw truth." June 8, 2007
25 out of 30 found this review helpful
"We have art," Nietzsche says, "so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth" (p. 267).
Michael Ondaatje (1943) has a rare talent for establishing exquisite resonances in his writing. Best known for The English Patient, Booker-Prize-winning novelist, Ondaatje's latest novel tells the breathtaking story of a single father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, who live on Northern California farm in the 1970s with a farmhand, Coop. Anna, Claire, and Coop develop an intensely-bonded triangle that is violently torn apart when the girls' father discovers Anna (at age 16) having sex with Coop (who is 20). The incident "sets fire" to the rest of Anna's life. Years later in the early 1900s, Ondaatje's now-fragmented characters Claire and Coop are reunited by chance in Nevada, while Anna is living in rural France. She has immersed herself in researching the life of Lucien Segura, a Gallic writer, while also attemting to come to terms with "the raw truth" of her own life. In the course of the novel, readers learn the novel's title not only refers to the street dividing San Francisco's Presidio from open space, but to the Spanish word "divisar," the vantage point of division. Anna's story becomes intertwined with the life of her subject, and Ondaatje's elliptical, structurally-disjointed narrative moves back and forth in both time and place, beautifully exploring the depths of family, youthful love, and becoming truly alone in the world.
Divisadero is a difficult book that becomes even more meaningful with a second reading. Parallels between the rural California and Segura stories emerge (like shards of glass that suddenly fit together), connections between the first and second half on the novel become more apparent, and many loose ends disappear. Anna finds meaning in her life only through her "contraptual dance" with Segura and his son, Raphael.
G. Merritt
'Divisadero' deserves the Booker Prize. June 13, 2007
24 out of 24 found this review helpful
It is difficult to write a review for a novel that rises above superlatives. Ondaatje is one of the world's greatest living writers, and Divisadero is his finest novel. At times it rises to the level of true greatness, and it is the most challenging novel I have ever read. It is also my new favorite.
Be forewarned: this is not a light read. The prose is smooth and lyrical and unmistakably Ondaatje. The novel focuses on memory, the past, and violence as his prior works have but Divisadero takes the concept one step further: it is separated into three distinct sections, overlapping enough only to give the reader a reason to continue reading. It reads more like a collection of three novellas than it does a novel. It also travels in reverse chronological order. I considered the opening section to be the main story, with the following stories as the reflections spoken of in the novel's last line.
This is not a novel that concerns itself heavily with plot. It is an exploration of its themes first and foremost. I don't want to speak for the author, but it seems to me it was not written to be a page turner. If that is what you're expecting I think you'll probably be disappointed. Any hope of that will be gone with the abrupt end to the opening section. But don't give up because of it. There are many novels with compelling stories: there are few that treat its reader with as much respect as Divisadero. Ondaatje tells you a story, but not all of it. He leaves the unwritten to the reader to piece together. What does it mean that Coop/Anna and Segura both have blue tables they treasure? What does it mean that Coop becomes a card player and Segura names Ramon's sidekick `One-eyed Jaques'? What does it mean that the colors of Anna's five flags are all represented in Segura's story, from the color of Marie-Neige's dress to the white mucus of diphtheria? My hat is off to you if you were able to decipher their meanings on your first read. I sure couldn't. But multiple readings are exactly what this book is all about. I'm not sure I agree with Amazon's description of the links between past and present as being `explosive', but they are definitely meaningful, and I would argue they are the core of the novel. I never -- NEVER -- reread books within a year, but this is going to be a notable exception.
This novel in one word: Haunting. It will stay with you for a long time. Ondaatje is a master.
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