Divisadero
by Michael Ondaatje
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Fiction. Literature. HTML:Northern California, 1970s. A father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it is riven by an incident of violence that sets fire to the rest of their lives.DIVISADERO takes us from the city of San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada’s casinos and eventually to the landscape of south-central France. As the narrative moves show more back and forth in time and place, we discover each of the characters managing to find some foothold in a present rough-hewn from the past.
Breathtakingly evoked and with unforgettable characters, DIVISADERO is a multilayered novel about passion, loss, and the unshakable past, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. It is Michael Ondaatje’s most intimate and beautiful novel to date. show less
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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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His dreamily seductive writing will beguile and hold the reader. Occasionally, when Ondaatje comes down to earth, such as a mention of the Persian Gulf war, does he lose the spellbinding quality with a reminder that there is a real world out there. It's not that this is poetic in a flowery way, in fact there are some brutal scenes in this diverging (divisidero?) story yet they do not detract from its elegance. However, to take in the subtleties, Ondaatje's novels require the reader's attention, this one maybe more than any other. The strange thing about reading Ondaatje is that I can hear his velvet voice, in the same way I can hear my mother's voice when I read her letters.
I can never quite make my mind up about Michael Ondaatje: sophisticated romance for people with university educations, or novels that expect us to take them seriously? He never seems to come off the fence, somehow. This one's a case in point: a positive delight to read, a kind of mashup between The virgin and the gypsy and one of those seventies films where Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford play professional gamblers; full of flattering allusions to French novelists he pretends to assume we've read, with a wealth of interesting settings in California and rural France; a cast of farmers, gamblers, gypsies, and carpenters; interesting romantic tensions between people who are somewhere between lovers and elective siblings, ambiguous scenes show more that may or may not be taking place in the characters' imaginations, connections across space and time, even a little dash of World War I. But it does leave you wondering afterwards what it's all for. show less
A family: two daughters, a father, a handyman. An almost numbing act of violence and each member of the family goes his or her own way. The book starts in Northern California and then roams the American West and rural France. As someone on Goodreads wrote, this “is not about the things that happened; it is a story about the things that were felt.” It is about what makes people tick and words are less important than relationships, feelings, silences. A point probably worth making: if you like “traditional” novels with a beginning, a middle, and an end, don’t read this book. It isn’t that kind of book. The middle isn’t a middle, the end most certainly is not an end. There is no end. Life has no end. Just puzzles without a show more solution, strings not tied up, false starts….
It took a while for me to get into this because Ondaatje focused on a part of the story/stories that just didn’t grab me. But once you’re involved, watch out! It’s partly the story, partly the writing, partly the omissions, the subtext. There’s a very short (maybe four or five page) “interlude” that is part of the backstory more than halfway in about a stepfather. Some of the best writing I have ever read, bar nothing. Ondaatje is one of the very best authors writing anywhere. Why isn’t HE on the Nobel short list? In a word: brilliant. show less
It took a while for me to get into this because Ondaatje focused on a part of the story/stories that just didn’t grab me. But once you’re involved, watch out! It’s partly the story, partly the writing, partly the omissions, the subtext. There’s a very short (maybe four or five page) “interlude” that is part of the backstory more than halfway in about a stepfather. Some of the best writing I have ever read, bar nothing. Ondaatje is one of the very best authors writing anywhere. Why isn’t HE on the Nobel short list? In a word: brilliant. show less
Ondaatje's prose is so comforting. At the end of each chapter I crave more of where he was as he turns to somewhere new, I'm left haunted by the characterizations and situations and feelings he's just revealed. He quotes Nabokov in this book as requiring a re-read to see the thing clearly, and this will be a pleasure.
This story, one of two sisters and nearly a brother, of ranching and silence and gambling and brazen skill and stupidity, of love and love-making, of fathers and daughters of near brother and sister forbidden love and violence, of re-naming, of france and 19th century poets and lovers who were boys once who keep herbs crushed close to their heart: it's one I will keep with me for quite some time and one I will return to show more again.
I just reread this. Read it last in July 2007. show less
This story, one of two sisters and nearly a brother, of ranching and silence and gambling and brazen skill and stupidity, of love and love-making, of fathers and daughters of near brother and sister forbidden love and violence, of re-naming, of france and 19th century poets and lovers who were boys once who keep herbs crushed close to their heart: it's one I will keep with me for quite some time and one I will return to show more again.
I just reread this. Read it last in July 2007. show less
The blurb on the back cover really doesn't do justice to the poetry - or, indeed, much of the plot - of the actual novel. I was expecting some sort of rural farm-based kitchen sink drama, but the 'division' between the two sisters occurs early on, and then the story branches off into two completely different directions. Claire and Coop stay in America, meeting randomly in the midst of their separate lives, and Anna leaves for France to immerse herself in the work of a reclusive author, Lucien, and takes a lover called Rafael. We get a glimpse into the lives of every character, and the story ends with Lucien's ill-fated romance during the First World War. And Ondaatje's beautiful language is like another character in its own right - I show more kept getting caught up in his poetic turns of phrase, but never lost the threads of the story. A magical interlude. show less
In our lives connections with others are intense for a while, then we move on to others and maybe pick up long forgotten ones. In Divisadero Michael Ondaatje sets out to portray this feeling by describing connected people in essential moments in their lives without showing any resolution. Those of us used to organized plots are disturbed by the lack of continuity. Characters disappear, never to return later in the book. Is my task as reader to imagine how each life develops or are those dropped lives now too trivial to bother with? The only way in which I could justify Ondaatje's approach was seeing the book as a dream where different layers shift and arc to something else. It was an interesting experiment, but I don't think it worked.
I show more loved the poetic language and the intimacy of each story. I could imagine a series of books in which each of the different stories is told fully. show less
I show more loved the poetic language and the intimacy of each story. I could imagine a series of books in which each of the different stories is told fully. show less
I'm sure if I re-read this book I would be more appreciative of its nuances, but dammit, I should not have to. A beautiful piece of work, constructed like a fairy tale with orphans (as is Warlight), there is much to admire in the writing. But a novel is more than metaphors, resonances and gestures over time. A novel needs some kind of plot, some kind of trajectory to drive it forward. The characters in a novel, at least some of them, have to persist over time, and not just fade unresolvedly from the narrative. By the end of this book, all the disparate strands of this book did NOT cohere and I could not wait to get it off my plate and move on to something less ambitious and more meaningful.
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Author Information
66+ Works 34,785 Members
Michael Ondaatje was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) on September 12, 1943. He moved to Canada in 1962 and became a Canadian citizen. He received a B.A. from the University of Toronto and a M.A. from Queen's University, Kingston, and taught English at York University. He has written several volumes of poetry, novels, and other works including show more There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do, The Dainty Monsters, Rat Jelly, Coming through Slaughter, Running in the Family, In the Skin of a Lion, Anil's Ghost, and The Cat's Table. His title, Warlight, made the bestseller list in 2018. Ondaatje has won numerous awards including the Canadian Governor General's Award in 1971 for The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and the Booker Prize in Fiction for The English Patient, which was adapted into a film in 1996. (Bowker Author Biography) Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka. He now lives in Toronto. (Publisher Provided) show less
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Awards and Honors
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Otavan kirjasto (192)
Work Relationships
Inspired
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Divisadero
- Original title
- Divisadero
- Original publication date
- 2007
- People/Characters
- Anna; Claire; Coop; Lucien Segura; Rafael
- Important places
- San Francisco, California, USA; California, USA; Nevada, USA; France
- Dedication
- 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
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)“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.”
- Blurbers
- Butala, Sharon
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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- Reviews
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- ISBNs
- 46
- ASINs
- 8