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Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9780676979152
ISBN: 0676979157
Label: Vintage Canada
Manufacturer: Vintage Canada
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: April 22, 2008
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Release Date: April 22, 2008
Studio: Vintage Canada

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Editorial Review:

Amazon.com Review:
From the celebrated author of The English Patient, comes another breathtaking, unforgettable story, this time about a family torn apart by an act of violence. Divisadero is a rich and rewarding read, one that Jhumpa Lahiri, in her guest review for Amazon.com (see below), calls "Ondaatje's finest novel to date." --Daphne Durham

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Guest Reviewer: Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, as well as the PEN/Hemingway Award for her mesmerizing debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies. Her poignant and powerful debut novel, The Namesake was adapted by screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, and released in theaters in 2007.

My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje. I began Divisadero as soon as it came into my possession and over the course of a few evenings was captivated by Ondaatje's finest novel to date. The story is simple, almost mythical, stemming from a family on a California farm that is ruptured just as it is about to begin. Two daughters, Anna and Claire, are raised not just as siblings but with the intense bond of twins, interchangeable, inseparable. Coop, a boy from a neighboring farm, is folded into the girls' lives as a hired hand and quasi-brother. Anna, Claire, and Coop form a triangle that is intimate and interdependent, a triangle that brutally explodes less than thirty pages into the book. We are left with a handful of glass, both narratively and thematically. But Divisadero is a deeply ordered, full-bodied work, and the fragmented characters, severed from their shared past, persevere in relation to one another, illuminating both what it means to belong to a family and what it means to be alone in the world. The notion of twins, of one becoming two, pervades the novel, and so the farm in California is mirrored by a farm in France, the setting for another plot line in the second half of the book and giving us, in a sense, two novels in one. But the stories are not only connected but calibrated by Ondaatje to reveal a haunting pattern of parallels, echoes, and reflections across time and place. Like Nabokov, another master of twinning, Ondaatje's method is deliberate but discreet, and it was only in rereading this beautiful book--which I wanted to do as soon as I finished it--that the intricate play of doubles was revealed. Every sign of the author's genius is here: the searing imagery, the incandescent writing, the calm probing of life's most turbulent and devastating experiences. No one writes as affectingly about passion, about time and memory, about violence--subjects that have shaped Ondaatje's previous novels. But there is a greater muscularity to Divisadero, an intensity born from its restraint. Episodes are boiled down to their essential elements, distilled but dramatic, resulting in a mosaic of profound dignity, with an elegiac quietude that only the greatest of writers can achieve. --Jhumpa Lahiri

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Product Description:
From the celebrated author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion comes a remarkable new novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time.

In the 1970s in northern California, near Gold Rush country, 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 — of both hand and heart — 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. It is here, outside a small rural village, that Anna becomes immersed in the life and the world of a writer from an earlier time — Lucien Segura. His compelling story, which has its beginnings at the turn of the century, circles around “the raw truth” of Anna’s own life, the one she’s left behind but can never truly leave. And as the narrative moves 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 multi-layered 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.


From the Hardcover edition.




Rating: - Beautiful Prose, Satisfying Read
Divisadero contains two stories with some connection. They are set in very different times and have very different tones.

The first is set in the late 20th century and involves 3 main characters who are raised as siblings though none are technically related. It spans a mostly peaceful life in California followed by a jaunt into the world of high stakes poker. There is love, violence and pain. It is a very compelling story that doesn't really reach final resolution. Several reviewers ... Read More

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Rating: - We Live Permanently In The Recurrence Of Our Own Stories
"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. " Erica Wagner

Michael Ondaatje has written exquisite prose and in the process has two novels in one. The first half of the book concerns a family in northern California. ... Read More

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Rating: - not satisfying
His prose is truly lovely, but reading this book is like driving a car with a bad clutch. It runs in fits & starts, bucks, disconnects, then gives the promise of going smoothly. I just couldn't get into the "flow" (or lack of) of this book & failed to feel much empathy with the characters. There always seemed to be something just over the horizon that I was just not seeing.

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Rating: - Great book
Beautifully written, heartbreaking and haunted. The story of the dynamic of a cobbled family and the errors that tear it asunder. Speaks of the growth and stunt of living through tragedy. One of the best books I've read in years.

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Rating: - Murky Parallels, Marvellous Prose
Divisadero consists of two separate stories connected by the slenderest of threads. The first story, told in the first half of the book, is about two sisters, Anna and Claire, raised by a widowed farmer in Northern California. Their father has also taken in Coop, the orphaned son of some neighbors. When the girls are sixteen and Coop nineteen, an event occurs that shatters the family into separate pieces. We follow Coop and Claire into their adult lives, where their stories simply peter out.

Read More

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