Divisadero - Hardcover

Ondaatje, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307266354 ISBN 13: 9780307266354

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007

Synopsis

From the celebrated author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion comes a remarkable new novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time.

In the 1970s in Northern California, near Gold Rush country, 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 riven by an incident of violence—of both hand and heart—that sets fire to the rest of their lives.

Divisadero takes us from the city of San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada’s casinos and eventually to the landscape of south-central France. It is here, outside a small rural village, that Anna becomes immersed in the life and the world of a writer from an earlier time—Lucien Segura. His compelling story, which has its beginnings at the turn of the century, circles around “the raw truth” of Anna’s own life, the one she’s left behind but can never truly leave. And as the narrative moves back and forth in time and place, we discover each of the characters managing to find some foothold in a present rough hewn from the past.  

Breathtakingly evoked and with unforgettable characters, Divisadero is a multilayered novel about passion, loss, and the unshakable past, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. It is Michael Ondaatje’s most intimate and beautiful novel to date.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Ondaatje is the author of four previous novels, a memoir, a nonfiction book on film, and several books of poetry. The English Patient won the Booker Prize; Anil’s Ghost won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Prix Médicis. Born in Sri Lanka, he now lives in Toronto.

Reviews

Reviewed by Jeff Turrentine

What an unusual, and unusually rich, experience it is to read Divisadero, the new novel by Michael Ondaatje -- like going for a walk in a familiar neck of the woods, getting lost and then discovering an entirely new neck of woods filled with unknown wonders. The title provides only the subtlest of clues: It's the name of the San Francisco street on which one character, Anna, lives. Within the story, it's mere trivia; none of the novel's action takes place there, and Anna herself only mentions her street in passing. But Ondaatje apparently loves what that word connotes -- a line between two realms, separating them but also hinging them. And how appropriate, for Divisadero is ultimately a story about two worlds divided by decades and oceans, but connected by clarion, undiminishable echoes.

Though Ondaatje is best known as the author of 1992's The English Patient, which went from being a well-regarded literary novel to a worldwide multimedia phenomenon, it's worth noting that he began his career as a poet. Surely the poet in him also appreciates all the anagrams (or near-anagrams) tucked into his new book's title: not just "divide," but also "desire," "eros" and "savior" -- words with particular resonance in the lives of Anna, Claire and Coop, the trio of quasi-siblings who grow up together in California before going their separate ways. Years after the three are forced to say an abrupt and violent goodbye, Anna's studies take her to an abandoned French farmhouse, the onetime home of a World War I-era writer whose work has become a focus of her scholarship. As she reconstructs the writer's life (with help from a lover who once knew him), Anna can't help but be struck by the remarkable similarities between his world and her own.

As the story begins, Anna is living on a Petaluma farm with her widowed father; with Coop, an older orphan boy taken in by her parents when her mother was still alive; and with Claire, another orphan who is born at the same time as Anna and who is raised, more or less, as Anna's sister. Without the bond of blood to enforce the incest taboo, it's pretty clear where we're headed, especially given Coop's penchant for rugged, shirtless, outdoor work and the teenage girls' penchant for watching him as he swings a hammer or dives into a water tank to patch a leak. The question isn't if something will happen but rather when Coop will take "one step beyond the intimacy that was handed to him," and with which of his almost-sisters.

The inevitable occurs, and when the father learns of it, this improvised family is broken apart. Coop, who is lucky to escape with his life, becomes a professional gambler, a career choice well-suited to his solitary ways and taciturn personality. Claire goes to work as an investigator for a public defender's office, where she specializes in discovering the presence of mitigating circumstances -- another perfect fit for a woman still trying to understand the act of violence that truncated her childhood. Which leaves Anna, who never looked back after running away from home at 16, but who now finds herself encountering, in the life of her biographical subject, the same themes and events that have shaped her own.

Ondaatje spends more than half of this novel following these three, interlacing their stories, expertly shifting into different voices and tenses, disrupting the conventional chronology with the easy grace that has become his hallmark. And then he does something very unconventional indeed. Two-thirds of the way through Divisadero, he abandons his characters. Or at least he seems to, as he picks up the trail of Lucien Segura, the French writer whose life and work have so intrigued Anna. And just like that, we cross the dividing line from one world into the next, with little understanding -- at first -- as to how Segura's tale could possibly mesh with all that has come before it.

The two stories do mesh, of course, but without the aid of any awkward contrivances or outlandish coincidences. There are no a-ha! moments, no disclosures of concealed ancestry or secret connective history. Instead, Ondaatje is coaxing us to acknowledge the universality of those themes hiding there inside his title -- desire, the ways we save one another and the debts we owe to those who save us -- and to see how they link all of us, irrespective of our backgrounds or circumstances or eras. Anna, who grew up with a brother who wasn't exactly her brother and a sister who wasn't exactly her sister, now discovers that she has a twin in the long-dead Segura, whose secrets and passions uncannily mirror her own. By the end of this hauntingly beautiful story, the reader will feel just as closely connected to the both of them.

And along the way, what wonderfully precise language we're treated to. A boy observing the night sky with his mother, drunk on starlight: "It was when he felt most clearly that there was no distinction between himself and what was beyond him -- a tree's sigh or his mother's song, could, it seemed, have been generated by his body. Just as whatever gesture he made was an act performed by the world around him." A married man who can't stop thinking about another woman, also married, who lives in the next farmhouse over: "He noticed the square of a lit window on the slope of the hill. There was a tightrope between the two farms, and below it an abyss."

There are countless more examples of perfect phrasing in Divisadero, and those who spend time within its pages will discover even more proof -- not that they needed it -- of Michael Ondaatje's peerlessness as a storyteller and poet.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

How do we account for the critics' varied reactions to Michael Ondaatje's latest novel? Is it "a beautifully crafted tale" (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel) or a "strangely broken-back beast of a novel" (Seattle Times)? Critics uniformly praised Ondaatje's graceful language and poetic imagery, but agreed on little else. Some applauded the nonlinear plot structure, while others found the constantly shifting times, places, and narrators confusing. Characters were pronounced both well-drawn individuals and flat, indistinguishable stereotypes. Several critics lamented the sudden, unexpected shift to Segura's life story, which left the previous plot unresolved. Readers should note that the critics who enjoyed Divisadero the most were those who approached it as a work of art rather than a conventional novel.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Ondaatje's oddly structured but emotionally riveting fifth novel opens in the Northern California of the 1970s. Anna, who is 16 and whose mother died in childbirth, has formed a serene makeshift family with her same-age adopted sister, Claire, and a taciturn farmhand, Coop, 20. But when the girls' father, otherwise a ghostly presence, finds Anna having sex with Coop and beats him brutally, Coop leaves the farm, drawing on a cardsharp's skills to make an itinerant living as a poker player. A chance meeting years later reunites him with Claire. Runaway teen Anna, scarred by her father's savage reaction, resurfaces as an adult in a rural French village, researching the life of a Gallic author, Jean Segura, who lived and died in the house where she has settled. The novel here bifurcates, veering almost a century into the past to recount Segura's life before WWI, leaving the stories of Coop, Claire and Anna enigmatically unresolved. The dreamlike Segura novella, juxtaposed with the longer opening section, will challenge readers to uncover subtle but explosive links between past and present. Ondaatje's first fiction in six years lacks the gut punch of Anil's Ghost and the harrowing meditation on brutality that marked The English Patient, but delivers his trademark seductive prose, quixotic characters and psychological intricacy. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* The new novel by the author of The English Patient (1992) is easy to read, not because its theme and plot are simple but because the reader simply wants to read it. Told from alternating points of view, the narrative might not have worked. But Ondaatje's experience and skill prevent fatal fragmentation. The story begins in California in the 1970s, with a quiet man who lost his wife in childbirth raising his two daughters, Anna and Claire, and tending his farm with the help of a young man, Coop, who he has more or less adopted. When the maturing Anna and Coop fall into a sexual relationship and are discovered, much to his horror, by Anna's father, a bolt of violence springs up like a ferocious storm, and Anna and Coop flee forever--never to see each other again. The shadow--no, the determining force--of this horrible event on how these three individuals lead the rest of their lives is the tripartite tale Ondaatje follows over the course of the next several years. So the reader experiences an initial sense of segmentation, but it dissipates in the face of strong thematic connections between what are not really segments at all, but rather, layers to the story. The novel's title, not idly chosen, refers to a San Francisco street name derived from the Spanish word for division. What this at once powerful and beautiful novel is about is the division of these three lives into two parts, a bifurcation that occurred when Anna's father found things out and exploded. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Divisadero

By our grandfather’s cabin, on the high ridge, opposite a slope of buckeye trees, Claire sits on her horse, wrapped in a thick blanket. She has camped all night and lit a fire in the hearth of that small structure our ancestor built more than a generation ago, and which he lived in like a hermit or some creature, when he first came to this country. He was a self-sufficient bachelor who eventually owned all the land he looked down onto. He married lackadaisically when he was forty, had one son, and left him this farm along the Petaluma road.

Claire moves slowly on the ridge above the two valleys full of morning mist. The coast is to her left. On her right is the journey to Sacramento and the delta towns such as Rio Vista with its populations left over from the Gold Rush.

She persuades the horse down through the whiteness alongside crowded trees. She has been smelling smoke for the last twenty minutes, and, on the outskirts of Glen Ellen, she sees the town bar on fire —the local arsonist has struck early, when certain it would be empty. She watches from a distance without dismounting. The horse, Territorial, seldom allows a remount; in this he can be fooled only once a day. The two of them, rider and animal, don’t fully trust each other, although the horse is my sister Claire’s closest ally. She will use every trick not in the book to stop his rearing and bucking. She carries plastic bags of water with her and leans forward and smashes them onto his neck so the animal believes it is his own blood and will calm for a minute. When Claire is on a horse she loses her limp and is in charge of the universe, a centaur. Someday she will meet and marry a centaur.

The fire takes an hour to burn down. The Glen Ellen Bar has always been the location of fights, and even now she can see scuffles starting up on the streets, perhaps to honour the landmark. She sidles the animal against the slippery red wood of a madrone bush and eats its berries, then rides down into the town, past the fire. Close by, as she passes, she can hear the last beams collapsing like a roll of thunder, and she steers the horse away from the sound.

On the way home she passes vineyards with their prehistoric-looking heat blowers that keep air moving so the vines don’t freeze. Ten years earlier, in her youth, smudge pots burned all night to keep the air warm.


Most mornings we used to come into the dark kitchen and silently cut thick slices of cheese for ourselves. My father drinks a cup of red wine. Then we walk to the barn. Coop is already there, raking the soiled straw, and soon we are milking the cows, our heads resting against their flanks. A father, his two eleven-year-old daughters, and Coop the hired hand, a few years older than us. No one has talked yet, there’s just been the noise of pails or gates swinging open.

Coop in those days spoke sparingly, in a low-pitched monologue to himself, as if language was uncertain. Essentially he was clarifying what he saw—the light in the barn, where to climb the approaching fence, which chicken to cordon off, capture, and tuck under his arm. Claire and I listened whenever we could. Coop was an open soul in those days. We realized his taciturn manner was not a wish for separateness but a tentativeness about words. He was adept in the physical world where he protected us. But in the world of language he was our student.

At that time, as sisters, we were mostly on our own. Our father had brought us up single-handed and was too busy to be conscious of intricacies. He was satisfied when we worked at our chores and easily belligerent when it became difficult to find us. Since the death of our mother it was Coop who listened to us complain and worry, and he allowed us the stage when he thought we wished for it. Our father gazed right through Coop. He was training him as a farmer and nothing else. What Coop read, however, were books about gold camps and gold mines in the California northeast, about those who had risked everything at a river bend on a left turn and so discovered a fortune. By the second half of the twentieth century he was, of course, a hundred years too late, but he knew there were still outcrops of gold, in rivers, under the bunch grass, or in the pine sierras.

*

Now and then our father embraced us as any father would. This happened only if you were able to catch him in that no-man’s-land between tiredness and sleep, when he seemed wayward to himself. I joined him on the old covered sofa, and I would lie like a slim dog in his arms, imitating his state of weariness—too much sun perhaps, or too hard a day’s work.

Claire would also be there sometimes, if she did not want to be left out, or if there was a storm. But I simply wished to have my face against his checkered shirt and pretend to be asleep. As if inhaling the flesh of an adult was a sin and also a glory, a right in any case. To do such a thing during daylight would have been unthinkable, he’d have pushed us aside. He was not a modern parent, he had been raised with a few male rules, and he no longer had a wife to qualify or compromise his beliefs. So you had to catch him in that twilight state, when he had ceded control on the tartan sofa, his girls enclosed, one in each of his arms. I would watch the flicker under his eyelid, the tremble within that covering skin that signalled his tiredness, as if he were being tugged in mid-river by a rope to some other place. And then I too would sleep, descending into the layer that was closest to him. A father who allows you that should protect you all of your days, I think.

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0307266354
• ISBN 13: 9780307266354
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 273