Divisadero (Vintage International)

This book is essentially two separate stories. Not totally uninteresting stories, but they both left a great deal to be desired. Attempts to truly define the characters are somewhat lacking, and just when it appears things will get interesting, the reader is left hanging. Oh sure, there is a connection between the two stories, but it's as thin as a hair, and leads me to believe the author tried to write two different books, could not make complete novels out of them, so tied these two together to give the impression of a completed book. I did not read THE ENGLISH PATIENT, and did not like the movie. Perhaps I should have known better.

A finely honed novel of epic proportions. It feels unfinished the way life does.

Several reviewers have mistakenly asserted here that this book is "about" three children who grow up together on a ranch and then go their separate ways, but of course it's not. That's because after sketching out their story, the author drops it completely in favor of another, about a poet and novelist in France during the early part of the twentieth century.

Symbolism and parallelism often help to reinforce and illuminate themes raised by a novel's plot, but here the author thins out the plot until these elements stick out like the ribs on a starving child. While some readers may admire this device, others might prefer a little more meat on the bones.

I am giving this book three stars because the writing was elegant and lyrical enough to hold my interest to the end. I can't give it a higher rating, however, because when I got to the end my reaction was "Oh. That's it." I didn't even feel cheated that the author never took his original story farther, because by the time I got to the end I had almost forgotten those characters.

The same may be said of the whole book. Like a daydream, it holds one's interest while in progress, and then afterwards disappears without a trace. Don't expect to see an Oscar-winning movie made from this one.

I was planning to lambaste this book unmercifully for its seemingly inexcusable digression in the middle of the book, where it wanders away from its three main characters and becomes fixated on Lucien Segura, a French writer of an earlier era who seems only tangentially connected to the main narrative thread. But then at the very end I understood his significance as a parallel character to the father of the three main characters that form the focus of the book's beginning sections.

Nevertheless, this understanding only partly excuses the self-indulgent digression evident in this novel, which I feel would have been much stronger had Ondaatje stayed with the characters who dominate its opening pages. By comparison, the Segura section, for all its lyrical beauty, lacks the compelling power of the earlier sections. Why did Ondaatje betray the reader in this insouciant fashion? Had he run out of ideas for his main characters? His choice -- to abandon these characters in mid-narrative -- seems perverse and inexplicable. This novel is by no means a success.

While I loved some of the writing here--Ondaatje really can evoke powerful images or emotions with just a phrase--I was disappointed with the book by the end. Frankly, the Coop/Claire/Ana storylines and how they weave together is just much more compelling than the French author and the gypsies and all that. It seemed like a different book. Actually, it seemed like the beginning of perhaps a trilogy, but still, Ondaatje builds the Coop and Claire stuff as if it's going to reach a conclusion, then pulls away only to return briefly at the end. I felt like Ondaatje lost the thread of what the novel was about, or got too caught up in the other stories and could not tie them all together satisfactorily.