It's a novel about style--a poet's novel--that seldom catches fire

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	• Divisadero (Vintage International) Michael Ondaatje Vintage, 2008 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 70 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

It's a novel about style--a poet's novel--that seldom catches fire

I never review a novel that isn't a five-star work, but why I found the craft and content of this novel thin, unbalanced, and formless might encourage other readers to give Divisadero a try. (I wonder, too, if Ondaatje isn't himself tired of the unqualified praise heaped on his novel.) While a novel might show us that modern life is thin and formless, the author's relationship to his characters should not be so. The warning that something might be off-balance about Ondaatje's conception of his characters came early when Claire supposedly controls her horse by carrying "plastic bags of water with her" and "smashes them" onto her horse's neck "so that the animal believes it is his own blood" (7). First of all, it's a fact that horses do not mistake the smell of water for their own blood, and so I thought this character's action was what's called magical realism; but this quirky bit sets up an expectation in the reader that is never repeated or fulfilled. As it turns out, Claire is a rather conventional, predictable person--so are Anna and Cooper--in such a way that an off-beat moment like that never seems part of the character. When these stylistic events happen a few times, the reader learns not to trust the writer. Often, these stylistic devices or out-of-character actions come across as the author's effort to be post-modern and experimental.

But a deeper structural difficulty becomes apparent. The event on which the entire novel allegedly hinges--Anna's father catching her with Cooper--is just not compelling. It doesn't feel real on the page. A father's rivalry with his daughter's boyfriend is not new, but it can be handled in a fresh, compelling way, but again Ondaatje doesn't manage it. Anna lifts a shard of glass to stab her father, and again, there's something unintentionally irritating about this scene. Moments in which the characters are supposedly making major decisions do not command the reader's attention in the way it seems the author meant.

Again, unfortunately, there is no compelling or enduring or necessary connection between Anna, any problem in Anna's life, and her interest in the deceased, fictional French author, Lucien Segura. While in France, Anna meets a gypsy, Rafael, but his character never comes alive on the page; in one section, he is gone for about twenty pages, and by the time his name is mentioned again, I'd completely forgotten who he was. I think Ondaatje was trying to push his art and craft in ways that it just wasn't going, and because he's a well-known, well-published writer, his agent or editor didn't stop him. (Perhaps one day, I might meet the author and apologize personally for all my negative comments.)

Part of the reason Divisadero feels unbalanced is that all of Part One--which is actually two-thirds of the book--has a kind of placelessness. The setting of northern California and the gambling halls of Tahoe doesn't feel palpable, like a setting at all; it is no place, perhaps because Cooper drives around a lot and is on the run, whereas in the final section on Lucien Segura, around World War I, the reader feels the countryside palpably, as though the author spent time there closely observing.

The issue I take up with Ondaatje is that if an author is more concerned about style and language than about characters' actions, then it says something about how that author sees life--and how the reader sees life, too--and the author sees as a poet. Beautiful sentences unattached to a strong plot never really grip a reader's psyche--or not this reader. I prefer the thickness and density and relevance and structure of McEwan's _Saturday_ to a novel about language and style. I feel certain that high school students would find Divisadero to be exciting, like reading a "grown up" novel, until they hunger for writing which can take root in the reader's soul.

Finally--if you're still reading this review--what I did find compelling and convincing about Lucien Segura were his observations of his daughters: "How had she, the one daughter he had known as obedient and well mannered, evolved into such a person? . . . " (230). Segura's observations of his daughter are so authentically detailed that I feel sure Michael Ondaatje is autobiographical here; i.e., it's about his own daughters.

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powerful but not perfect novel

i agree with many of the pros and cons in other customer reviews and struggled with whether to give 3 or 4 stars.

on the plus side: ondaatje is a writer's writer, his language is simple, spare and poetic. the words dreamy and atmospheric come to mind. he also creates powerful images and stories. i was particularly enamored here of coop's time in vegas as well as anna's life in france. the book is rife with wisdom and makes you think.

on the disappointing side: i found much to admire but not as much that moved me. the voice is disengaged and the characters emotions are like plastic fruit. i also found myself wandering during the last 20% of the novel.

so very good, intriguing but flawed

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A Eupopean point of view

A lot of papers and magazines announced Michael Ondaatjes Divisadero. At the same time the American and German book are available. Though I'm not a native speaker I bought the American one. I remembered the great language of the translations into German of his former novels. Now I wanted to know the original language of the author. - And what happens? Starting at the very first page I got a lot of problems. All this rural words! I could not translate, I could not understand. I worked with a professional dictionary (containing 100,000 words). I missed words. And sometimes I found two contrary interpretations of one sentence. Not only the language, but the content gave me a lot of problems, too. The story is changing in time, forward and backward, the teller changes and the locations.

At the end, I hope I understood, because I found some similarities between my "translation" and the blurb, and I'm wondering: Michael Ondaatje, born 1943 in Sri Lanka, working and living in Torornto now, is telling us Europaen about

- the World War
- a forgotten French writer
- life in South France

My knowledge about France and the stories of my grandfathers military service in France are quiet different.

Our life in Germany differs very strong from that in Divisadero too. We have no time to repair old wooden houses or to walk along a riverside. We do not sleep with our neighboor. We call our stepfathers, husbands and wifes by their names. We can not imagine our or the French landscape as a Hollywood movie picture. We do not know sympathical gypsies or intelligent thieves. Our life excitement doesn't come from violence and accidents.

I mean the story is not typical. It seems very strange and not authentic to me. I emphasize that the novel Divisadero is a fiction. Thank to Amazon you can publish your opinion of this book. You can answer me. Did you met Anna or Rafael?

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Michael Ondaatje For Christmas

Its always a present to yourself when Michael Ondaatje has a new book. Even better is getting the book at a lesser price than the book store and sending for it nine days before Chrsitmas regular mail and still getting it in time for Christmas. Thank you Amazon.com

Elegant and deeply satisfying

In a recent interview, novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje likened the work of a writer to that of an archaeologist. "How one deals with the past," he said, "has always been a very important thing in my work." His elegant and deeply satisfying new novel, DIVISADERO, offers ample support for that self-characterization in the way it focuses on the power of love and memory to sustain connections over large stretches of space and time.

The plot of DIVISADERO unfolds in two broad, loosely connected narratives. The first involves two sisters, Anna and Claire, who are raised by their emotionally distant father on a northern California farm. As a teenager, Anna falls in love with a handsome and enigmatic farmhand by the name of Coop, who the family had taken in as a child when his parents were murdered. The relationship between the two lovers is shattered by an act of violence that is barely explicable and chilling in its brutality. Coop drifts into the life of a professional poker player in the casinos and Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe, and eventually reconnects with Claire, who works as an investigator for a San Francisco public defender. Anna becomes a writer who travels to France to research the life and work of an obscure French author by the name of Lucien Segura. She inhabits the farmhouse in which Segura once lived, and her lover Rafael, whose gypsy family lived on a portion of the same property, connects her life to that of the long dead writer.

The other narrative recounts the life of Segura in France in the early part of the 20th century. From Segura's blinding in a childhood accident reminiscent of the traumatic event that separated Anna and Coop, to his lifelong infatuation with Marie-Neige, a poor young woman who takes up residence with a husband twice her age in a cottage on the Segura family homestead, Ondaatje explores the beauty and isolation of the creative mind and the power of love to sustain passion for another over the course of a lifetime.

As one would expect from a poet of Ondaatje's considerable talents, DIVISADERO is suffused with radiant prose. Whether he's describing the rugged farm country of northern California or the harsh beauty and occasional cruelty of life in a French village, his eye is fixed firmly on telling sensory details that bring his settings vividly to life. One character imagines a bird's eye view of the world, picturing "petite life on earth, a drifting of voices, the creak of a wagon, the retort and smoke from a gun among the almond trees...with only the essential notes of life reaching you through that distance of air." Another contrasts her life of rural poverty with that of "a rich man on horseback who galloped across the world, riding into a forest just to inhale its wet birch leaves after a storm." In countless other passages, and in writing that is expressive without being ornate or precious, Ondaatje patiently layers one such vivid image upon another to weave a tapestry of arresting beauty.

DIVISADERO is decidedly not a work for readers seeking a fast-paced plot or tidy resolutions. Ondaatje's technique, forsaking linear plot development and resisting the temptation to make facile connections between his overlapping narratives, is likely to frustrate those accustomed to more conventional storytelling structures. Time fractures and circles back on itself, and the aftershocks of traumatic events ripple ceaselessly through the lives of the characters, "the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue," Ondaatje writes. For his characters, "the raw truth of an episode never ends." The beauty of the novel, and the reward it offers to thoughtful readers (and perhaps re-readers), is the opportunity to ferret out connections that are only hinted at with a tantalizing obliqueness in the text itself.

"With memory, with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways," Ondaatje writes. "We can circle time. A paragraph or an episode from another era will haunt us in the night, as the words of a stranger can." In shimmering prose that is as evocative as it is full of truth, DIVISADERO reminds us again of this poignant reality of our existence.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, page 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

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