Michael Ondaatje

It is the 1970s in Northern California. A farmer and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work the land with the help of Coop, the enigmatic young man who lives with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until they are riven by an incident of violence - of both hand and heart - that 'sets fire to the rest of their lives'. This is a story of possession and loss, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. Written in the sensuous prose for which Michael Ondaatje's fiction is celebrated, Divisadero is the work of a master story-teller.

Divisadero

Laura Mauler

I like when an author switches from one perspective/narrator to another, and then successfully weaves them together to make a whole story. The key to this is the successful weaving part, though, and this is where "Divisadero" fails the most for me. Also, I prefer a plot, story arc, and a pretty high verb to adjective ratio, none of which did this book have. It was more a collection of vignettes, yet they didn't all come together to make something more than the sum of their parts like a good collection should. (An excellent example of vignettes coming together to make more than the sum of their parts is "The House on Mango Street" - super good read.) 

This book was the July selection for my book club, and after talking it over and hearing their interpretations I actually have a much more positive view of this book than when I had first finished reading it. They discussed themes of loneliness and divisions ("divisaderos"), poetry disguised as prose, and the human need for closure. All these ideas are very tied to this book, yet did not become obvious to me until others pointed them out. Hearing the book clubbers talk about these themes was enjoyable, but reading this book was not.

Daryl Houston

The shape of this book seems somehow dented to me. Ondaatje begins building a story around the scattering of a set of adoptive siblings (with a bit of a twist) and their various paths in life. Some of the detours aren't that interesting, frankly. The last half or so of the book centers on the life of one of the kids (now grown) and her settling in France. She's researching the life of a writer (now dead) and in fact living in his old home. For much of the end of the book, Ondaatje gives us that writer's back story in lyrical and often quite lovely, evocative prose.

There are parallels between the writer's early life and the early life of the researcher and writer through whose eyes we're being told that story (recall, one of our siblings). That the researched writer had two daughters involved in a love triangle with one of their suitors bears certain resemblances to our siblings' history as well. I'm sure there are more echoes between the several stories.

On the whole, the lives of Claire and Coop (two of the siblings) were pretty dull (not to mention, in Coop's case, a little surprising), and the lopsided structure of the novel proved a turn-off for me. It struck me at one point that it seemed almost a little cycle of short stories. I would have read with pleasure a novel in the style of the latter part of the book, which was deftly and tenderly written.

On the other hand, the title of the book suggests a sort of division (as does the sundering of a couple of families in the book), so perhaps what seems like sort of clumsily lopsided book is divided into its parts by design, though if so it's a design that didn't much appeal to me.

Divisadero

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