Divisadero

by Michael Ondaatje

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’.
Anna will come to rest in the calming landscape of south-central France. There, she delves into the story of a writer who, decades earlier, lived in the isolated house she now occupies – a story that circles around the ‘raw truth’ of her own life, the one she’s left behind but can never truly leave. And while Anna’s story lies at the heart of the novel, the narrative sweeps across the terrain of the lives of Coop and Claire as well, each of them managing to find some foothold in a present rough-hewn from the past.
Thisis 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.

(From Publisher).

Michael Ondaatje is the author of five novels including Divisadero, published by Bloomsbury in September 2007 and in paperback in August 2008, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and shortlisted for The Giller Prize and the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. He has also written a memoir, a non-fiction book on film and several books of poetry. He co-edited Lost Classics,a compendium of wonderful short essays, with Michael Redhill, Esta Spalding and Linda Spalding. His novel The English Patient won the Booker Prize; another of his novels, Anil’s Ghost, won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Prix Medicis. Born in Sri Lanka, he now lives in Toronto.

Intricate in its writing, lyrical and quite moving. Nominated for several awards in Canada.

Ondaatje writes from a deep inkwell of poetry. Every sentence exhudes genius, beauty and honesty.

The novel is a kind of artistic summary and conclusion of motifs and subjects of all former novels by the prolific Canadian author, it is brilliantly written in a post modernistic manner.

A gracefully written story about escape, shadows of the past and how only art can recreate a life and a world.

This complex and exquisitely written novel explores the connections, parallels and divisions between the lives of three people in the same family and a novelist from a century earlier.

Ondaatje is a master, if the characters don't draw you in then the sheer poetry of his writing will. The book's structure is unique and plays on themes, the ripple of time, cause and effec,t all subtly connected but not necessarily resolved.

In his conjuring and sensitive writing Ondaatje describes a tragical family saga. In his almost surrealistic art of narration, he masterly transposes elements of the plot into the formal and dramaturgical structure of the novel.

With Ondaatjes language that has no equivalent competition in its poetic and unique beauty he tells a family drama that is as fascinating and absorbing as it is complex and disturbing.

Interestingly constructed novel with a haunting pattern of parallels, echoes and reflections across time and place.