Vintage 2008
Michael Ondaatje will always be known as the author of The English Patient, a hit as a novel and then as a movie. With his newest novel, Divisadero, he has scored another hit. The writing is sensuous, languid, filled with images, both sublime and earthy. It is a story of separation, division, that feeling of not belonging quite any place or to any relationship. Every character seems to be alone, abandoned, fading in and out of the movie of Life. Concurrently, each character seems to be seeking a place to be, a partner to be with.
The novel is divided into three parts, a division which reinforces the sense of apartness. Part one sets the characters into time and place, giving them the impetus for their subsequent actions. Part two provides the back story of Rafael, the gypsy youth, while part three does the same for the poet Lucien Segura. Couple the clear divisions with shifts back and forth in time and among narrative characters in these latter two parts and the reader will have to invest some intellectual energy as Ondaatje burrows more deeply into their stories and leads them toward some sense of wholeness.
Anna's mother died at her birth. When her father brought Anna home to the farm, he also brought Claire, born the same week to another mother who died, to the farm. Cooper is older and had also been taken in by Anna's parents after his parents were violently murdered by a farmhand when he was only 4 years old.
Michael Ondaatje will always be known as the author of The English Patient, a hit as a novel and then as a movie. With his newest novel, Divisadero, he has scored another hit. The writing is sensuous, languid, filled with images, both sublime and earthy. It is a story of separation, division, that feeling of not belonging quite any place or to any relationship. Every character seems to be alone, abandoned, fading in and out of the movie of Life. Concurrently, each character seems to be seeking a place to be, a partner to be with.
The novel is divided into three parts, a division which reinforces the sense of apartness. Part one sets the characters into time and place, giving them the impetus for their subsequent actions. Part two provides the back story of Rafael, the gypsy youth, while part three does the same for the poet Lucien Segura. Couple the clear divisions with shifts back and forth in time and among narrative characters in these latter two parts and the reader will have to invest some intellectual energy as Ondaatje burrows more deeply into their stories and leads them toward some sense of wholeness.
Anna's mother died at her birth. When her father brought Anna home to the farm, he also brought Claire, born the same week to another mother who died, to the farm. Cooper is older and had also been taken in by Anna's parents after his parents were violently murdered by a farmhand when he was only 4 years old.
Anna and Claire were "sisters" until age 16 when Anna began to have sex with Cooper. Her father discovered them in flagrante delicto and nearly beat the undefending Cooper to death during a violent storm. Recovered, Cooper moved to Las Vegas and made a big score gambling but had to leave town before being beat up. It won't be the last time he risked or received a beating. Not to mention that life was beating him down. When we next see Anna she is in the French countryside to write and rest. She is researching the life of and "translating the sparse texts by Lucien Segura." She is staying in the house where he lived. Rafael enters the picture. But, no matter how intimate Anna and Rafael are, "he keeps far away from her what else he is."
Anna's home is on Divisadero Street in San Francisco, not so far from the Petaluma farm where she grew up. Divisadero is a good word with two meanings. It means "division" and the street literally divides the city from the fields of the Presidio. It also means to gaze at something from a distance. This is what Anna does with life; her very job, researching and archiving the past, provides a distance between her and life. Few writers are Ondaatje's equal in evoking this sense of distance and lack of clarity, as in a fog that is slowly lifting. This is no better illustrated than when Segura is quoted as thinking about his wife: Essays are written about him, even by his wife. He thought their relationship was affectionate, but "He read a few pages and realized how each of them was truly invisible to the other."
Anna's home is on Divisadero Street in San Francisco, not so far from the Petaluma farm where she grew up. Divisadero is a good word with two meanings. It means "division" and the street literally divides the city from the fields of the Presidio. It also means to gaze at something from a distance. This is what Anna does with life; her very job, researching and archiving the past, provides a distance between her and life. Few writers are Ondaatje's equal in evoking this sense of distance and lack of clarity, as in a fog that is slowly lifting. This is no better illustrated than when Segura is quoted as thinking about his wife: Essays are written about him, even by his wife. He thought their relationship was affectionate, but "He read a few pages and realized how each of them was truly invisible to the other."
Claire does research for a public defender in San Francisco. Each weekend she goes to the farm in Petaluma where she has dinner with her father then next morning rides her horse out into the hills. "She rose from her limp into the stirrup and was instantly free of it." She is no longer close to her father, but is family with her co-workers. She shares life information with them, but never with her father. In Lake Tahoe on a case Claire runs into Cooper who now makes his living gambling.
He lives in a hotel in Santa Maria where he had met Bridget, a coke addict. Cooper thinks she looks like Anna. It is a set-up to get him to Tahoe to gambling for 3 men who have a plan to beat the odds. He doesn't cooperate and they beat him up, so badly he has amnesia: "His mind was this scrubbed table that could barely remember." He confuses Claire, who rescues him, with Anna. In Sanskrit poetics, this is "gostraskhalana," or calling a loved one by the wrong name, literally stumbling on the name. This illustrates one of the many best things about Ondaatje's books, and this one in particular. When one least expects it some obscure allusion or quote pops up and fits exactly. Of course, any good novelist will find the perfect quote, but Ondaatje is distinguished by the scope of where he finds them.
He lives in a hotel in Santa Maria where he had met Bridget, a coke addict. Cooper thinks she looks like Anna. It is a set-up to get him to Tahoe to gambling for 3 men who have a plan to beat the odds. He doesn't cooperate and they beat him up, so badly he has amnesia: "His mind was this scrubbed table that could barely remember." He confuses Claire, who rescues him, with Anna. In Sanskrit poetics, this is "gostraskhalana," or calling a loved one by the wrong name, literally stumbling on the name. This illustrates one of the many best things about Ondaatje's books, and this one in particular. When one least expects it some obscure allusion or quote pops up and fits exactly. Of course, any good novelist will find the perfect quote, but Ondaatje is distinguished by the scope of where he finds them.
If we are always becoming what we will be, then we are informed and formed by a part that is always within us. It is our past that makes our future possible. We learn about Ondaatje's characters in much the same way we learn about our friends, a bit here and a bit there. And, some things we never learn. This novel is not about resolution, but we learn so much about each character that we certainly know them as well as we might know any of our friends. Yet, we would like to know more.
Divisadero, just Ondaatje's fifth novel since his debut with Coming Through Slaughter in 1976, solidifies his position in the top ranks of modern novelists. The plot, intentionally fragmented as it is, is clear. The story is engaging and makes the reader need to keep turning the page. The prose is emotionally powerful, the characters finely drawn.
He has been far more prolific as a poet, 13 books so far. Of course, his novels are so poetic that one could make a rational argument that they are prose poems at their best. Born in Sri Lanka, he grew up in England and Canada, and has lived in Toronto since 1970. He and his wife, Linda Spalding, a novelist, are among the editors of Brick, A Literary Magazine.
Divisadero, just Ondaatje's fifth novel since his debut with Coming Through Slaughter in 1976, solidifies his position in the top ranks of modern novelists. The plot, intentionally fragmented as it is, is clear. The story is engaging and makes the reader need to keep turning the page. The prose is emotionally powerful, the characters finely drawn.
He has been far more prolific as a poet, 13 books so far. Of course, his novels are so poetic that one could make a rational argument that they are prose poems at their best. Born in Sri Lanka, he grew up in England and Canada, and has lived in Toronto since 1970. He and his wife, Linda Spalding, a novelist, are among the editors of Brick, A Literary Magazine.
