Divisadero (Vintage International)

I will never, ever understand any of the lofty praise given to this book. DIVISADERO is not well written, the characters are poorly crafted, and the plot meanders through pointless action until it reaches a completely underwhelming conclusion. Though there are short sections that are interesting and perhaps somewhat involving, this is not a work that tells a great story, or great stories. So much of it is just cliche and boring.

I should mention that I read this for a college class and was involved with multiple discussions on the different aspects of the novel. The general concensus, which I found to be quite accurate, was that despite high aims, DIVISADERO is a failed attempt at a classic that trips over its poor development and prose.

I had the opportunity to meet and briefly speak with Ondaatje after reading DIVISADERO, and I found that it made perfect sense when he said that he set out writing the novel with no idea of where he was going to take it. While I think an unplanned novel can definitely end up as something beautiful, in this case it ends up just being somethin sloppy.

The author is wonderful writer both in terms of prose and story line. But I was very disappointed in the book's story line. After becoming engrossed in the characters and events of book one, he switches stories and you are left hanging with regards to the characters in the first book. I could hardly finish the book.

It's an outstanding book; this Divisadero. For the characters in this book and particularly Anna it is what was stated within; "I look into the distance for those I have lost, so that I see them everywhere." The impact on lives of a violent punctuation point is clear. The book becomes a bit "kaleidoscopic" in the back 1/3rd, but then again that is the point. Lives touched by loss never are quite the same and Ondaatje does a masterful job with the language to capture that sentiment. Bravo!

i agree with many of the pros and cons in other customer reviews and struggled with whether to give 3 or 4 stars.

on the plus side: ondaatje is a writer's writer, his language is simple, spare and poetic. the words dreamy and atmospheric come to mind. he also creates powerful images and stories. i was particularly enamored here of coop's time in vegas as well as anna's life in france. the book is rife with wisdom and makes you think.

on the disappointing side: i found much to admire but not as much that moved me. the voice is disengaged and the characters emotions are like plastic fruit. i also found myself wandering during the last 20% of the novel.

so very good, intriguing but flawed

In a recent interview, novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje likened the work of a writer to that of an archaeologist. "How one deals with the past," he said, "has always been a very important thing in my work." His elegant and deeply satisfying new novel, DIVISADERO, offers ample support for that self-characterization in the way it focuses on the power of love and memory to sustain connections over large stretches of space and time.

The plot of DIVISADERO unfolds in two broad, loosely connected narratives. The first involves two sisters, Anna and Claire, who are raised by their emotionally distant father on a northern California farm. As a teenager, Anna falls in love with a handsome and enigmatic farmhand by the name of Coop, who the family had taken in as a child when his parents were murdered. The relationship between the two lovers is shattered by an act of violence that is barely explicable and chilling in its brutality. Coop drifts into the life of a professional poker player in the casinos and Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe, and eventually reconnects with Claire, who works as an investigator for a San Francisco public defender. Anna becomes a writer who travels to France to research the life and work of an obscure French author by the name of Lucien Segura. She inhabits the farmhouse in which Segura once lived, and her lover Rafael, whose gypsy family lived on a portion of the same property, connects her life to that of the long dead writer.

The other narrative recounts the life of Segura in France in the early part of the 20th century. From Segura's blinding in a childhood accident reminiscent of the traumatic event that separated Anna and Coop, to his lifelong infatuation with Marie-Neige, a poor young woman who takes up residence with a husband twice her age in a cottage on the Segura family homestead, Ondaatje explores the beauty and isolation of the creative mind and the power of love to sustain passion for another over the course of a lifetime.

As one would expect from a poet of Ondaatje's considerable talents, DIVISADERO is suffused with radiant prose. Whether he's describing the rugged farm country of northern California or the harsh beauty and occasional cruelty of life in a French village, his eye is fixed firmly on telling sensory details that bring his settings vividly to life. One character imagines a bird's eye view of the world, picturing "petite life on earth, a drifting of voices, the creak of a wagon, the retort and smoke from a gun among the almond trees...with only the essential notes of life reaching you through that distance of air." Another contrasts her life of rural poverty with that of "a rich man on horseback who galloped across the world, riding into a forest just to inhale its wet birch leaves after a storm." In countless other passages, and in writing that is expressive without being ornate or precious, Ondaatje patiently layers one such vivid image upon another to weave a tapestry of arresting beauty.

DIVISADERO is decidedly not a work for readers seeking a fast-paced plot or tidy resolutions. Ondaatje's technique, forsaking linear plot development and resisting the temptation to make facile connections between his overlapping narratives, is likely to frustrate those accustomed to more conventional storytelling structures. Time fractures and circles back on itself, and the aftershocks of traumatic events ripple ceaselessly through the lives of the characters, "the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue," Ondaatje writes. For his characters, "the raw truth of an episode never ends." The beauty of the novel, and the reward it offers to thoughtful readers (and perhaps re-readers), is the opportunity to ferret out connections that are only hinted at with a tantalizing obliqueness in the text itself.

"With memory, with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways," Ondaatje writes. "We can circle time. A paragraph or an episode from another era will haunt us in the night, as the words of a stranger can." In shimmering prose that is as evocative as it is full of truth, DIVISADERO reminds us again of this poignant reality of our existence.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)