Divisadero

Review by New York Times Review

"I COME from Divisadero Street," Anna tells us in Michael Ondaatje's fifth novel. "Divisadero, from the Spanish word for 'division,' the street that at one time was the dividing line between San Francisco and the fields of the Presidio. Or it might derive from the word divisar, meaning 'to gaze at something from a distance.'" This claim about Anna's origins, which arrives midway through Ondaatje's restless book, we know to be false. For the story begins in Anna's childhood, as she grows up on a farm in Northern California with her father, her sister, Claire, and an adopted farmhand, Coop - only four years older than the sisters, who are, ostensibly, twins. And yet this too is not quite the truth, because Anna's mother died at 23, giving birth to Anna; her father (perhaps strangely, but this is Ondaatje's coincidental world) brings home another baby whose mother died as she was born and raises them together. "It was a field hospital on the outskirts of Santa Rosa, and to put it brutally, they owed him a wife, they owed him something." The title of the first part of this first section is "The Orphan," and that might be supposed to refer to Coop, rescued as a toddler by Anna's parents from a neighboring farm when his own family was murdered by a hired hand. But in the world of this novel, whose characters yearn for connection only to be thwarted, it might refer to any of them - divided from one another, somehow always set at a distance. "Divisadero" is a series of narratives that calls itself, perhaps for convenience' sake, a novel. I'm not sure that it is, in fact, a novel; but then I wouldn't be happy calling it a book of linked stories, either. Ondaatje is a writer who likes to blur form, as he did in his 1982 memoir, "Running in the Family." (Note, in his list of previous works, the relaxed category "Fiction and Memoir.") So we have a book in three sections: "Anna, Claire and Coop," "The Family in the Cart" and "The House in Dému," three tales loosely braided together like slack rope. The first section is the longest, effectively the first half of the book, and is a bleakly moving rendering of lives disrupted by brutality and loss. Coop falls, of course, for one of the sisters he's raised with; it happens to be Anna, the true daughter, and while her blood-link to her father is the source of their love's tragic outcome, the youthful desire that Ondaatje conjures gives the believable feeling that this was simply an unfortunate accident. Anna and Coop are discovered by her father, and Coop, who'd escaped murder as a boy, almost falls victim as a young man. Anna saves her lover by nearly committing murder herself, then flees to become "the person formerly known as Anna," forever in shadow. "Her past is hidden from everyone. She has never turned to a lover or friends when they speak about families (and she always inquires of their families) and spoken of her childhood." It is this hiding that sets the rest of the book's mechanism in motion. Anna is, in truth, the orphan - at least, this is how she sees herself, in flight from her past. "Those who have an orphan's sense of history love history," she says. She buries herself in archives, "where art meets life in secret," a wonderful phrase. She discovers the work of a French poet, Lucien Segura, who wrote in Dému, in the Gers region of France, until one day he simply disappeared: "His voice with the wound in it kept haunting me," which hardly seems surprising. But this is not a novel of surprise: it is one of looping intersection, of unlikely encounters that carry the force of the author's conviction. Yes, it must be so - some pattern wills it to be. Is it credible that, much later, Claire should happen upon Coop, once again nearly dead from a beating, purely by chance? Ondaatje demands a reader's trust, an acceptance that a work of fiction can accommodate the peculiar alignments that bless and bedevil everyday life. How convenient the collection of characters in Villa San Girolamo in "The English Patient," how lucky the pairing of pathologist and archaeologist in "Anil's Ghost." If that kind of thing tries your patience, Ondaatje may not be the novelist for you. And yet, I'd argue, pay closer attention and you may think he's on to something. He is a poet as much as (or even more than) he is a novelist, and the crosscurrents of his writing flow and ripple against each other as poems might. Sequences of images set themselves out in their individual beauty and lucidity; sometimes how they fit into the whole is almost beside the point. Anna (whose name echoes that of Hana in "The English Patient") takes herself off to the Gers to live in the house where Segura had lived at the end of his life; there she meets Rafael, a guitar-playing Gypsy with pockets full of wild herbs whose love begins to heal her. He is also her connection to Segura: and the final two sections of the book are the vanished writer's own story of love, loss and brokenhearted redemption. Ondaatje's fascination with the metaphor of blindness (think of the burned Almasy, temporarily unable to see, in "The English Patient," or Ananda in "Anil's Ghost," who paints eyes on statues of Buddha and whose craft might restore the identity of one long dead) is once again in evidence here: Segura is half-blinded as a boy in a freak accident involving a dog bursting through a pane of glass. But his injury is the beginning of the fractured love affair that will haunt his life, and the works of fiction he will create, in secret, to resurrect a vanished passion. Give in to Ondaatje and his language will seduce you. Sometimes his particularity can be overbearing: Coop's later career as a cardsharp is marked by poker hands laid out on the page; I found them annoying, but then again I don't play. A conversation between Coop and a cardplaying friend about Styron and "Sophie's Choice" similarly seems forced; a reference to the Persian Gulf war a distraction. Ondaatje is at his best let loose in the dream world of his warmblooded imagination. Because of this the second half of the book - Segura's story, and the story of Rafael's family - is more satisfying than the first, more vivid in its evocation of the French countryside and a vanished way of life. It's no good wishing a novel were different than it is; but the brokenness of Ondaatje's tale can be frustrating. Still: "Divisadero." What did we expect? It's possible to believe that Ondaatje's method of mosaic more accurately reflects the untidy turns life tends to take; his characters make unfortunate decisions but then, so do we. There is something endearingly human about this book, for all its art: who can't forgive a hopeless romantic? 'Divisadero' is a series of narratives that calls itself, perhaps for convenience sake, a novel. Erica Wagner's most recent book is "Seizure," a novel. She is literary editor of The Times of London.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]

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Review by Booklist Review

The new novel by the author of The English Patient (1992) is easy to read, not because its theme and plot are simple but because the reader simply wants to read it. Told from alternating points of view, the narrative might not have worked. But Ondaatje's experience and skill prevent fatal fragmentation. The story begins in California in the 1970s, with a quiet man who lost his wife in childbirth raising his two daughters, Anna and Claire, and tending his farm with the help of a young man, Coop, who he has more or less adopted. When the maturing Anna and Coop fall into a sexual relationship and are discovered, much to his horror, by Anna's father, a bolt of violence springs up like a ferocious storm, and Anna and Coop flee forever--never to see each other again. The shadow--no, the determining force--of this horrible event on how these three individuals lead the rest of their lives is the tripartite tale Ondaatje follows over the course of the next several years. So the reader experiences an initial sense of segmentation, but it dissipates in the face of strong thematic connections between what are not really segments at all, but rather, layers to the story. The novel's title, not idly chosen, refers to a San Francisco street name derived from the Spanish word for division. What this at once powerful and beautiful novel is about is the division of these three lives into two parts, a bifurcation that occurred when Anna's father found things out and exploded. --Brad Hooper Copyright 2007 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Ondaatje's oddly structured but emotionally riveting fifth novel opens in the Northern California of the 1970s. Anna, who is 16 and whose mother died in childbirth, has formed a serene makeshift family with her same-age adopted sister, Claire, and a taciturn farmhand, Coop, 20. But when the girls' father, otherwise a ghostly presence, finds Anna having sex with Coop and beats him brutally, Coop leaves the farm, drawing on a cardsharp's skills to make an itinerant living as a poker player. A chance meeting years later reunites him with Claire. Runaway teen Anna, scarred by her father's savage reaction, resurfaces as an adult in a rural French village, researching the life of a Gallic author, Jean Segura, who lived and died in the house where she has settled. The novel here bifurcates, veering almost a century into the past to recount Segura's life before WWI, leaving the stories of Coop, Claire and Anna enigmatically unresolved. The dreamlike Segura novella, juxtaposed with the longer opening section, will challenge readers to uncover subtle but explosive links between past and present. Ondaatje's first fiction in six years lacks the gut punch of Anil's Ghost and the harrowing meditation on brutality that marked The English Patient, but delivers his trademark seductive prose, quixotic characters and psychological intricacy. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Both beautiful and baffling, Ondaatje's most recent novel (after 2000's Anil's Ghost) opens with the portrait of a complex family suddenly imploding in the Northern California wilderness. Anna and Claire have been raised as sisters by Anna's father (both mothers died in childbirth), with a neighbor boy named Coop also in attendance, his family having been battered to death by a hired hand. Anna and Claire both have feelings for Coop, but it's Anna who enters into an affair with him, precipitating an act of violence that flings the family apart. Subsequent passages detail Coop's desperate gambling, Anna's isolation in distant France, Coop and Claire's chance meeting years later, and the family history of poet Lucien Segura, whose works Anna has been studying. These passage are evocatively and delicately rendered, but their connections aren't; the book falls apart into lovely pieces that the reader has a hard time collecting. Oddly, this sense of dislocation does not seem to be the point, for a sense of family connection reverberates faintly throughout despite the disjointed narrative. Of course, dedicated readers will want to investigate, but others may be confounded. For literary collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/07.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Poetic intensity trumps structural irregularity and storytelling opacity in the celebrated Ontario author's intense fifth novel (Anil's Ghost, 2000, etc.). Its several stories unfold within two distinct clusters of narratives. The first begins in California in the 1970s, when Anna and her half-sister Claire (a "foundling") are separated after their father discovers teenaged Anna in the embrace of their hired hand Coop (another orphan). He beats the younger man nearly to death and is himself attacked by his half-crazed daughter. Thereafter, the story is distributed among Coop's education as a poker player and misadventures among his criminal associates; Claire's attempt to rebuild her life as a public defender's legal researcher (which leads her to a brief chance reunion with Coop); and Anna's pursuit of an academic career as a specialist in French literature, which takes her to the French countryside and the home of late author Lucien Segura--whose life, as reconstructed from her research, is most cunningly connected, incident by incident, image by image, to the story of Anna's destroyed family. Echoes of Ondaatje's Booker Prize winner The English Patient (1992) resound throughout Lucien's story, in which a withdrawn, dreamy boy is shaken into life when a gypsy pair--volatile Roman and his teenaged bride Marie-Neige--are given land to farm in exchange for work performed for Lucien's stoical single mother Odile. The illiterate Marie-Neige becomes Lucien's soul mate, eventual intellectual companion and the love of his life--until war takes him away from their quiet village, returning him home only when it is too late to reclaim the unlived life that will endure only in the books he writes. Intricate, lyrical, profoundly moving, this brilliantly imagined meditation on love, loss and memory unforgettably dramatizes the rueful realization that "[t]here is the hidden presence of others in us...[and] We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross." Not to be missed. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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From Divisadero By our grandfather's cabin, on the high ridge, opposite a slope of buckeye trees, Claire sits on her horse, wrapped in a thick blanket. She has camped all night and lit a fire in the hearth of that small structure our ancestor built more than a generation ago, and which he lived in like a hermit or some creature, when he first came to this country. He was a self-sufficient bachelor who eventually owned all the land he looked down onto. He married lackadaisically when he was forty, had one son, and left him this farm along the Petaluma road. Claire moves slowly on the ridge above the two valleys full of morning mist. The coast is to her left. On her right is the journey to Sacramento and the delta towns such as Rio Vista with its populations left over from the Gold Rush. She persuades the horse down through the whiteness alongside crowded trees. She has been smelling smoke for the last twenty minutes, and, on the outskirts of Glen Ellen, she sees the town bar on fire --the local arsonist has struck early, when certain it would be empty. She watches from a distance without dismounting. The horse, Territorial, seldom allows a remount; in this he can be fooled only once a day. The two of them, rider and animal, don't fully trust each other, although the horse is my sister Claire's closest ally. She will use every trick not in the book to stop his rearing and bucking. She carries plastic bags of water with her and leans forward and smashes them onto his neck so the animal believes it is his own blood and will calm for a minute. When Claire is on a horse she loses her limp and is in charge of the universe, a centaur. Someday she will meet and marry a centaur. The fire takes an hour to burn down. The Glen Ellen Bar has always been the location of fights, and even now she can see scuffles starting up on the streets, perhaps to honour the landmark. She sidles the animal against the slippery red wood of a madrone bush and eats its berries, then rides down into the town, past the fire. Close by, as she passes, she can hear the last beams collapsing like a roll of thunder, and she steers the horse away from the sound. On the way home she passes vineyards with their prehistoric-looking heat blowers that keep air moving so the vines don't freeze. Ten years earlier, in her youth, smudge pots burned all night to keep the air warm. Most mornings we used to come into the dark kitchen and silently cut thick slices of cheese for ourselves. My father drinks a cup of red wine. Then we walk to the barn. Coop is already there, raking the soiled straw, and soon we are milking the cows, our heads resting against their flanks. A father, his two eleven-year-old daughters, and Coop the hired hand, a few years older than us. No one has talked yet, there's just been the noise of pails or gates swinging open. Coop in those days spoke sparingly, in a low-pitched monologue to himself, as if language was uncertain. Essentially he was clarifying what he saw--the light in the barn, where to climb the approaching fence, which chicken to cordon off, capture, and tuck under his arm. Claire and I listened whenever we could. Coop was an open soul in those days. We realized his taciturn manner was not a wish for separateness but a tentativeness about words. He was adept in the physical world where he protected us. But in the world of language he was our student. At that time, as sisters, we were mostly on our own. Our father had brought us up single-handed and was too busy to be conscious of intricacies. He was satisfied when we worked at our chores and easily belligerent when it became difficult to find us. Since the death of our mother it was Coop who listened to us complain and worry, and he allowed us the stage when he thought we wished for it. Our father gazed right through Coop. He was training him as a farmer and nothing else. What Coop read, however, were books about gold camps and gold mines in the California northeast, about those who had risked everything at a river bend on a left turn and so discovered a fortune. By the second half of the twentieth century he was, of course, a hundred years too late, but he knew there were still outcrops of gold, in rivers, under the bunch grass, or in the pine sierras. * Now and then our father embraced us as any father would. This happened only if you were able to catch him in that no-man's-land between tiredness and sleep, when he seemed wayward to himself. I joined him on the old covered sofa, and I would lie like a slim dog in his arms, imitating his state of weariness--too much sun perhaps, or too hard a day's work. Claire would also be there sometimes, if she did not want to be left out, or if there was a storm. But I simply wished to have my face against his checkered shirt and pretend to be asleep. As if inhaling the flesh of an adult was a sin and also a glory, a right in any case. To do such a thing during daylight would have been unthinkable, he'd have pushed us aside. He was not a modern parent, he had been raised with a few male rules, and he no longer had a wife to qualify or compromise his beliefs. So you had to catch him in that twilight state, when he had ceded control on the tartan sofa, his girls enclosed, one in each of his arms. I would watch the flicker under his eyelid, the tremble within that covering skin that signalled his tiredness, as if he were being tugged in mid-river by a rope to some other place. And then I too would sleep, descending into the layer that was closest to him. A father who allows you that should protect you all of your days, I think. Excerpted from Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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