It is always rather embarrassing not quite to 'get' what it is about a book that is so well reviewed, particularly when that experience leaves you feeling a bit intellectually inadequate. I found this book (a subtle grouping of interconnected novellas above love and lust, place and time) difficult to engage with. In particular, the scenes set in France felt very cliched to me - do we really need yet more exquisite writing about the simple pleasures of the French countryside? Having just driven through some of it, I feel the book failed to engage with, for example, the large numbers of le Macdonalds and out of town superstore sheds that exist alongside the charming stone buildings and local cheeses in most of rural France! Though perhaps the fantasy element of it was intentional, aimed at juxtaposing an idealistic vision of France with the more rough hewn depiction of America. The American scenes and characters felt more vital - the world of gambling and organised crime, alongside the hard work of country life and a set of more or less inarticulate relationships. So while I admired the craft of construction and wordplay in the book, it never took life for me.

Loved the first half of the book, was blown away by the culminating scene of Anna & Coop, then spent the rest of the book going, yeah, yeah, yeah, what about Anna and Coop!!!

I loved this book. The language and description was so beautiful. The two stories 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 him I've read is The English Patient. I have to say I liked this one better. ( )

Future Nobel laureate Ondaatje mashes together two novellas, both of which are beautifully written, into one discombobulated novel here. Wherever he was going with this, he didn't quite get there. ( )

Although this novel is classified as fiction, Ondaatje's poetic ear permeates every page of this multi-layered, many-textured piece of prose. On the first read, the tragic and eulogistic tone reminds one of Woolf's "To the Lighthouse"--Ondaatje's concern for discerning life through moments is particularly Woolfian, and rarely does he ever order the reader through his text; he suggests, intimates, perhaps turns the reader's gaze in a very general direction, but promptly gives up control and demands that reader draw his or her own conclusions. If you don't like being left to your own devices with the narrative, avoid this novel. If you love great writing, read this book over and over and over again. ( )

THE MAGIC WORDS OF MICHAEL ONDAATJE

Some years ago, after Michael Ondaatje had written “The English Patient,“ I finagled an invitation to a private reading held by the Canadian Consulate for an exclusive group of business executives. Upon arrival my husband and I were quickly unmasked as fakes, but, enduring the slings and arrows of whispered remarks and sidelong glances, we held our ground and remained for the reading. When Ondaatje appeared I found him a simple man in dress, humble in manner, and a diffident reader of his works. I recall thinking that if only I wrote prose like his I would strut, not fret, my hour upon the stage.
After reading this introduction, you’ll probably not be very surprised by my confession that when it comes to Michael Ondaatje’s works I’m like a besotted teenager faced with the object of her desire. I find his words magical; his creations dreamlike. Which brings me to “Divisadero,” Ondaatje’s most recent novel, a much debated and often maligned work.
In “Divisadero” Ondaatje explores the bonds of family: the family given us through blood-relation and the family we choose. Anna, is the only daughter of a Northern California widowed farmer who adopts another girl, Claire, when Anna’s and Claire’s mothers both die in childbirth. Born just hours apart, Claire becomes Anna’s “twin.“ A boy, Coop, the orphaned son of a neighboring farm couple, is already part of the family. Divisadero is the story of these three. We meet them briefly as teenagers, see the family torn apart, then each of them continue their separate lives. Claire and Coop meet again, accidentally, but providentially.
Coop’s story seems to strike some reviewers as the least satisfactory, charging the writer of having created and then abandoned this character. Coop represents the random violence all of us often face in life through war, fate, or of our own making. Coop’s parents were murdered when he was just a boy, he is taken into this neighboring family, then expelled, cruelly and violently. Although he is a temperate man, violence follows him like his own shadow until Claire gently guides him home. This, to me, is a very poignant scene and satisfactory conclusion to Coop’s story.
But Anna is the focus and storyteller of “Divisadero.” Although she leaves home and country, her siblings and father are never far from her heart and mind. She finds her soul mate in the past life of Lucien Segura, a poet whose life story she explores as she settles into his house in the small village in Southern France and chooses his “adopted” son as lover and companion. This is where Ondaatje’s writing turns truly magical. As Anna’s and Segura’s stories intertwine, the scenes become stunningly sensual, gorgeously trancelike.
When I finished “Divisadero,“ I felt such a loss, I had to re-read this book at once. I wanted again to take part in the lives of the ill-fated Marie-Neige and her husband, Roman, an incarnation of the enigmatic Coop, all raw rage, which he is unable to verbalize. I wanted again to eat a simple meal of herbs and onions grown in the garden of a small farm house in Southern France on a warm summer’s day. And I wanted again to dance with no purpose with a cat. So find yourself a quiet corner in a garden or a sun-filled room and let one of our generation’s greatest writers awaken your senses, touch your heart, and seduce you with this magic dance called “Divisadero.” ( )

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. ( )

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! ( )

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. ( )

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.

The story 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.

This is not one of Ondaadje best works and if you've never read his work before, please don't start with this novel. 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. ( )

Divisadero is a novel divided into two story lines, about a century apart and on different continents. The tenuous relationship between the two stories mirrors the tenuous human relationships in the novel. The first story takes place in rural Northern California in the 1970s, on the farm of a makeshift family: a father whose wife died in childbirth, his daughter Anna, an adopted daughter Claire (who was born and orphaned during the same week as Anna), and Coop, a young man from a neighboring farm who was taken in by this family as a young child after his parents were murdered. Anna and Claire are especially close, inseparable as most twins, and both view Coop as part of the family, a special sibling-like older friend. However, Anna and Coop develop an attaction and passion for each other, and when Anna's father eventually catches them together, the consequences are horrible and violent. Anna's father beats up Coop (who does not fight back), and Anna runs away, so that Claire, Coop, and Anna completely lose touch with each other. The family they had is gone.

The second story follows the life of a reclusive famous writer, Lucien Segura, whose work and biography the grown-up Anna is researching with fascination. I thought that Lucien Segura's story was every bit as compelling as the first, and there are parallels between Anna's and Lucien's lives and motifs that multiply in the reader's mind upon reflection. The stories are not told chronologically, since Ondaatje is really striving to express how certain events in our lives make us who we are and so never fade away with time.

I found this book beautifully written and captivating, and enjoyed all of it. It's true that not all the lives are resolved at the end, but as a young Lucien Segura once said to a friend, "Not knowing something essential makes you more involved." Ondaatje doesn't just give out the answers.

Beautifully written, heartbreaking and haunted. The story of the dynamic of a cobbled family and the errors that tear it asunder. Speaks of the growth and stunt of living through tragedy. One of the best books I've read in years. ( )

Brief, crystalline lingustic frameworks around essential, sensual experiences characterize this unusually-structured novel by Michael Ondaatje. It reads like a train of thought from start to end, drifting across space and time as they evocative memories of its characters tug at it.

It's a jolting ride sometimes, leaping unapologetically from Anna, Coop and Claire's family on an idyllic, Stegner- or Steinbeck-esque California farm to a brutal, drug-addled gambling montage in Nevada, where everything seems to be done in deep blues and night. Then a long jaunt in southern France where everything is different but ever so slightly the same.

Ondaantje peels his words carefully from a layered world of experience and emotional intensity. He captures well the high, sharp emotions that shape our lives, the pivots of meaning at which everything changes, sometimes across generations. Experiences had by people divided from each other by reality or time, but connected by the barest filament of something. A senescing author in Gascony, an overconfident card shark.

Don't wait for something to happen or make sense. It is not a logical progression, nor is there the satisfaction of resolution at the end. To some it will likely feel frustrating and ill-focused. But if you half-close your eyes and let your mind loosen its grip on causality, there are some golden, sun-calmed fields in Southern France and a hermit's cabin in the hills near Petaluma that you might want to go on a quiet, literary vacation to. ( )

Disappointing - was really engaged by the Coop story but not the Lucien one. This felt like two separate novellas chucked into one book? ( )

A powerful narrative of disparate lives and those events that bring us together or tear us apart. Michael Ondaatje's writing is poetic, alive like in his previous novels, but is also a master at structure in this novel, where unrelated stories are threaded into a novel on about being alone in the world and the meaning of family. Ondatje's seemingly two unrelated stories are paralleled into one exploration of memory, search for one's identity, and the struggle of all characters to free themselves from what they once were, but cannot help but be.

A beautiful novel that deserves much more than one read ( )

Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero is beautifully constructed and written. It is a bit complex, and difficult to explain without divulging too many details, but I’ll try.

It is the story of three children, raised by the same man, whose name we never learn. The eldest child, a boy named Cooper, was taken in by the man and his wife after a tragedy destroyed his family. Anna was born to the man’s wife, Lydia Mendez, who died shortly thereafter. When the man took Anna home from the hospital, he also took Claire, another baby who had been born at the same time and been orphaned. This family lives and works on a farm in Northern California, near Petaluma.

The story begins when the children are teenagers, in the 1970’s. Initially, Anna is the narrator. After an incident of extreme violence tears apart the family, Cooper and Anna leave the farm. When the story picks up, many years have passed. The children are grown, and each is leading a separate life. The have, in fact, not seen or spoken to one another since the incident.

The remainder of the story is told from each of their viewpoints. They take different paths to adulthood. Anna is living in rural France, researching the life of Lucien Seguro, a writer. In his life, we see echoes of the lives of our original characters.

As I said, this book is a bit difficult to explain but it is worth reading. Divisadero is a winner of the Governor General’s Award for fiction. This prize is given by the Canada Council for the Arts. Michael Ondaatje’s best known work is likely The English Patient, which was a Man Booker Prize winner. Ondaatje’s prose is lyrical and quite, and lovely to read. If you’re looking for a novel to challenge you a bit, this might be it. ( )

I'm a huge Ondaatje fan, and I've been looking forward to reading this one for some time. Seeing as I'm living in San Francisco this summer, it only seemed appropriate that I should seize the day. I was not disappointed. The saga of Anna, Coop, and Claire was fascinating, and I only had two complaints about the whole book, one of which was that it wasn't long enough.

The ending was a bit lacking in my opinion, as well, but I guess I can't have everything. That aside, this one still gets top marks from me. ( )

This is the third novel I've read by Michael Ondaatje, he writes as a poet more then a novelist. This novel got better the deeper I got into it. Personally I liked Anil's Ghost better but I did like this novel very much at the end. The novel starts in the farm county of Northern California in the 1970s and ends up in the county side of France of pre-WW1 to the end of the war. Onaaatje explores love, family, writing, one of the main characters in a French poet, and our personal fate. The book looks at the mystery of life, what is often hidden. ( )

I have now read three of Ondaatje's novels (The English Patient has had three readings at least) and this one was more convoluted than the others. I was going to describe it via the double helix, the side by side twisting of stories that intertwine. But that isn't quite right, because that vision is a little too symmetrical. The stories within Divisadero, while clearly related, don't have that symmetry going for them.

The novel (pair of novellas? - some describe it this way) begins with three young people, Anna, Claire and Coop, who are brought up by the same man. Only one daughter is naturally his, the other two are raised by him due to varying circumstances; Claire brought home from the hospital after her birth (which took place where and when Anna was born) and Coop coming into their home when he was four.

Neither one of them had made a move before the other. It felt as if one heart beat was at work. Anna - who used to leap around like a boy or a dog; the one who'd broken her wrist, which Coop had splinted up with willow before he drove her to a sawbones in Petaluma, and who dared her sister to walk across the highway by the reservoir blindfolded ('I'll pay you, Claire') and, when Claire didn't, did so herself; the one who read so constantly and carefully she always had a frown, as if gazing at a fly on the end of her nose - one day began walking up the east ridge to his cabin in sunlight, along the curving path the cows, and sometimes Alturas, took.

As the near-siblings grow older, a closer and intimate relationship develops between two of them.

Was what happened a sin or a natural act? You live within the crucible of a family long enough and you attach yourself to what you gaze on as a boy or a girl, some logic might say to explain what took place on that deck, in the silence where there was no hammering, a silence as if no other life was being lived.

But tragedy hits when Anna's father finds them. The story picks up again years later and the once intertwined lives are now on different and very divergent paths.

The raw truth of an incident never ends, and the story of Coop and the terrain of my sister's life are endless to me. They are the sudden possibility every time I pick up the telephone when it rings some late hour after midnight, and I wait for his voice, or the deep breath before Claire will announce herself.
For I have taken myself away from who I was with them, and what I used to be. When my name was Anna.

As in his previous novels, Mr. Ondaatje uses rich language and a circuitous path to tell the stories of these lives going back and forth in the telling to give it a multilayered texture that feels like a dance. ( )

I don’t really know how to accurately express how I feel about the book. Individual segments of it were engaging and interesting and very poetic and lyrical. BUT I didn’t feel like the whole book worked together.

The first part of the book revolved around the little eclectic family (Coop, Anna, Claire, and farmer father) on a farm in northern California. After a violent episode, Anna runs away, and Coop, after he recovers, also runs away. As the result of the violent episode, the group is splintered and damaged. The rest of the book examines the damaged individuals as they seek solitude and healing in their new lives.

This kind of thing has been done before. I’m sure there are thousands of examples, but I can only think of two off of the top of my head: A Time to Kill and Lovely Bones. Michael Ondaatje delves deeper than the others, I think. He is able to forge through the characters and show the duplicity that necessarily attends when you hide from the past.

The next part of the book deals with the individual and damaged lives of Claire, Coop, and Anna. At the end of the second part, Claire is driving Coop, who has amnesia, to see the farmer/dad. The third part of the book focuses on the life of the writer that Anna is researching and the people in his life. The writer, Jean Segura, becomes almost a character himself, even though he is dead.

The plot moves along slowly, but not in an obnoxious way. The book gets me to slow down and think about random things like a reaction to a bee landing on a guitar, like the idea that visiting a lover’s house might deliver a message of commitment, and like how a person can avoid her life by becoming enmeshed in someone else’s. The images are also very memorable. One that stayed with me is Anna and Rafael swimming in a pond that requires them to lay on their backs in order to be completely immersed.

I like the book. As I mentioned, it’s very lyrical. I just had no revving need to get to the end. I guess the point is that you can’t really be restored after something like that happens. You can heal, but there will always be scars. I'm just not quite sure how to make it all fit together. I think this book deserves an eventual rereading. Overall, I’d give it three stars. ( )

I listened to this as an audio book and enjoyed it until about 2/3 through when I got completely lost. I gave up on it and decided to finish it in print, but maybe later after I get to some other books I want to read. I loved Ondaatje's The English Patient, but this just didn't grab my attention the same way. ( )

A beautiful book. Probably not for those who are not fond of intersecting plots picked up at seemingly random places, unclear beginnings, middles and endings, and lack of closures. But it's a beautifully written novel, very much character driven, about love and loss, longing and the strangely accidental yet interconnected paths of life. It reads almost like poetry- it's written in stunning and very atmospheric images.
I probably liked it most of everything I have read by Ondaatje.
( )

Michael Ondaatje is an amazing writer -- his use of language is beautiful. And, he tells a good story.

This is the story of Anna, Claire and Cooper, living on a farm in the 1970s until an act of passion and violence rips the family apart forever.

Anna leaves the family home, never to return. Yet, she finds herself immersed in a parallel life (that of author Lucien Segura and his family), proving that you can't ever get away from who you really are.

The book is more like two intertwined stories rather than a novel. I came to care very much about Anna, Claire and Coop, and they pretty much disappeared from the book about half way through it. The story of Lucien Segura slowly grew on me, but it took a few hours after I'd finished reading the book to really appreciate how closely linked the two stories actually were. ( )