Divisadero (Spanish Edition) - Softcover

Ondaatje, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 8466337687 ISBN 13: 9788466337687

Publisher: Debolsillo, 2017

Synopsis

Tras El paciente inglés, Ondaatje reafirma en Divisadero su extraordinaria capacidad para moverse en el difícil terreno de los sentimientos y para tratar las pasiones, las pérdidas y la persistencia del pasado. Un relato de inusual intensidad y belleza.

En la más íntima y hermosa de sus historias, Michael Ondaatje narra la vida de Anna, quien tras un brutal suceso acontecido en su hogar, tendrá que dejar atrás la vida en la granja de California y empezar un nuevo camino en el sur de Francia. Lejos de su padre, de su gemela Claire y de Coop -un misterioso muchacho acogido por la familia- encontrará en la literatura y en la reconstrucción de la biografía de un importante escritor la manera de conciliarse con su pasado.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

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.

About this title

Review:

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

About the Author:

Michale Ondaatje (Colombo, Sri Lanka, 1943), novelista, poeta, profesor universitario y editor canadiense de origen cingalés, ha cultivado diversos géneros literarios con un estilo siempre innovador. Fascinado por el Oeste americano escribió Las obras completas de Billy el Niño (1970), una original combinación de poesía, prosa e imágenes. Entre su obra narrativa destacan novelas como En una piel de león (1987), El fantasma de Anil (2000, Premio Médicis, Irish Times International Fiction Prize y Premio Giller), Divisadero (2008) y El viaje de Mina (2011). Sin embargo, la obra que le otorgó reconocimiento internacional fue El paciente inglés (1992, Premio Booker), adaptada al cine por Anthony Minghella en 1996. Su aclamada obra poética, con títulos como Los monstruos cotidianos (1967) o El hombre con siete dedos en los pies (1969), se caracteriza por la profusión de sorprendentes imágenes y metáforas. También ha escrito sus memorias, recogidas en el libro Cosas de familia (1998).

About this edition

• Publisher: Debolsillo
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 8466337687
• ISBN 13: 9788466337687
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 312