Name: Divisadero
Rating: 3.5 (10 reviews)
ISBN: 9780307266354

Michael Ondaatje

Divisadero

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.

Sabine Delorme

Robyn Campbell

Kim Arychuk

Matti Scherzinger

Alisa K

Janna

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

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