eveninglightwriter: While Ondaatje is definitly more poetic in his descriptions, Julia Glass is just as enjoyable. I really felt myself swept away by both books. There seems to be a strong sense of place and time that both writers portray beautifully.
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Confusing. There's the beginning plot, then it splinters, and from that another story and its backstory emerge. I really thought there would be a clearer tie in to the original story, of Clara and Ann and the boy, but it wasn't that strong. Maybe a re-read or proper study would help. ( )
It took the whole book before I felt I had anything like a handle on this book. The style does not sit comfortably. I couldn't grip or connect to the characters - I never did since the last quarter of the book is about different characters. As soon as I felt the book was getting somewhere, it changed. Ondaatje writes well, but seems to me, like so many men who 'write well', to be unable to connect with characters. ( )
I loved this book. The language and description was so beautiful. The two story arcs seemed kind of incongruous at times, but they definitely paralleled each other. It is a book to be read not for the plot but the language. The only other book by Ondaatje I've read is The English Patient. I have to say I liked this one better. ( )
I remember adding this novel to my wishlist when it first came out because I thought the book description sounded like something that would appeal to me. Having not read anything by Ondaatje before, I guess I was not prepared for his writing style. I'm reading all these other great reviews and frankly, I don't get them. I can appreciate the prose -- it's really well written and beautiful at times, but that's the best I can say. To me, this story went nowhere. Point of view was flip flopping back & forth from the first to third person, the time frame was back & forth in seemingly no logical order, and the transitions were really rough. The first one-third or so of the novel centered around the three main characters as described in the book description. But from then on the story went off on a tangent which, to me, had no real relativity to where the story began. I started losing interest at about that one-third mark, and despite reading on & hoping to see something come full circle, it never did, and I was disgusted with myself for having not given up when I was first inclined to. I haven't rated a book this low in quite a while, and I have to wonder if something's wrong with my interpretation, but this one just didn't do it for me. At all. ( )
For John and Beverly and in loving memory of Creon Corea - remembered by us as 'Egilly"
First words
When I came to lie in your arms, you sometimes ask me in which historical moment do I wish to exist.
Quotations
Wij hebben kunst opdat wij niet door de waarheid zullen worden vernietigd (Nietzsche)
“There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.”
So we fall in love with ghosts.
With memory, with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways. 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.
Last words
“He turns his back to the far shore and rows toward it. He can in this way travel away from, yet still see, his house....he feels he is riding a floating skeleton...Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible.”
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
(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:07:31 -0400)
Fleeing the violence that destroyed her family and separated her from her sister Claire and Coop, an enigmatic young man who lives with them, Anna finds refuge in an isolated house in south-central France, while she struggles to reconcile the past and present.… (more)
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10
There's the beginning plot, then it splinters, and from that another story and its backstory emerge. I really thought there would be a clearer tie in to the original story, of Clara and Ann and the boy, but it wasn't that strong. Maybe a re-read or proper study would help. (