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Loading... Divisadero (Vintage International)by Michael Ondaatje
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Oh my god. Every once in a while and this happens like maybe once a year, I find, you read a book that is just the RIGHT BOOK at the right time. And this is it. Amazing. Gorgeous. It's hard to even say. Because there is also a roughness to it, to the characters that is almost gripping. That and, ta-dah it is so intricately structured. I love structures that I want to think about. And this is one. I want to just turn it over and read it again and again.It also makes me want to go back and read The History of Love which was that most perfect book about two years ago. Sigh. Now I have to read something very silly otherwise I will be sorely disappointed. Everyone who hasn't read this one must read it right away. You will be awed and amazed. (  )miriamparker | Mar 19, 2009 |   Ondaatje is one of my all-time favorite authors. His writing is so poetic ans well-constructed. This is one I need to read again. I read the stories as a string an the character's stories morphed into others. As per usual, the ending hit me hard and feeling like I didn't get the whole picture...I like books best that I need to read again. The initial reading was wonderful! (  )heathersblue | Feb 19, 2009 | I just finished reading this novel and found it a good read. The story is about two identical twin girls and how their lives are changed through the relationship they build with the neighbor's son who they adopt into their family. As it travels through their pasts and most current life stories it is hard to put down the novel. Although, the story of a French author is also planted in the novel and at points it makes it difficult to understand as it weaves inbetween the other story. It is however a good addition to the novel as it seems that Ondaatje uses the story of the French author (whose story takes place decades before the story of the twins) to underline the impact of the relationships that we read about between the twins and the adopted son Coop. ( )petaloutha | Jan 29, 2009 | For some odd reason I found this difficult to get into the first time I tried - but this time it was pulling me in to the past and present of the 3 main characters [and the French setting of part of it.] Very very well constructed and written as you might expect. mairangiwoman | Jan 25, 2009 | A powerful tale of three adopted siblings and the events that forever connect and divide them. Beginning in Gold Rush-era California and spreading across Atlantic ocean, Divisadero has all of the imagery and emotional mystery that Ondaatje has become celebrated for. At times I found my attention wandering from the story and I'm not sure if this was due to my own lack of interest in the specific subject matter or because Ondaatje included a lot of different locations and ideas but didn't always link them effectively to central idea of the novel. I may need to read it again to decide which was to blame. LovelyPride | Jan 24, 2009 | 0.048 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0307266354, Hardcover)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 Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:20 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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