Customer Rating:  
Summary: Beautiful Prose, Satisfying Read
Comment: 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 mention the lack of resolution as an issue but I did not find myself needing more explanation.
Through the research of one of the main characters in the first story, we move to the second tale set mostly in the early 20th century and spanning World War I. It is the story of writer Lucien Segura and his struggles with family, war and love. It is very different than the first and moves much more slowly but is nonetheless a satisfying read. I did not find that it lagged.
I enjoyed the contrast in tone, content and setting between the two stories though some may find the stories disconnected from one another.
Linking everything is Ondaatje's lyrical prose. It really is a wonderfully written novel.
In all, I enjoyed it very much. It was shortlisted for Canada's top fiction prize the Giller Award in 2007. It is a far superior work to that year's Giller winner, Late Nights On Air. I can only assume that the panel thought that Ondaatje receives enough accolades for his work including a previous Giller for Anil's Ghost and the Booker for The English Patient.
Customer Rating:
Summary: We Live Permanently In The Recurrence Of Our Own Stories
Comment: "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. Anna and Claire, their father and Coop the orphan who was rescued from a family who were murdered. This convoluted group exposes their inner and outer selves and we come to understand that each of the children considers himself an orphan. The family is broken apart when love and lust intervene and the father takes justice into his own hands. Anna leaves to find her own world and Coop and Claire meet years later in Las Vegas under unusual circumstances.
In the second half of the book, Anna moves to Europe to research the life of French poet, Lucien Segura. She discovers that art and literature are what Europe is made of. Rafael, a gypsy guitarist comes into her life. Segura is also introduced and his entire life is shown within characters introdcuced by Rafael. None of this really goes anywhere. The novel became more disjointed than convincing. Ondaatje seems to want us to understand how we all 'live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories'. But this keeps recurring and loses the vitality of the first part of the novel for me. I was left feeling underwhelmed and wanted the story of Claire and Coop to be resolved.
Recommended. prisrob 01-03-09
Across the Great Divide: The Band and America
Literature and Film as Modern Mythology:
Customer Rating:
Summary: not satisfying
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great book
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Murky Parallels, Marvellous Prose
Comment: 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.
Anna becomes a scholar, and journeys to rural France to research the life of an obscure writer, Lucien Segura. There she meets Rafael, a gypsy who when he was a little boy knew Segura as an old man. Anna then fades into the background as the story reels backward, into Segura's youth, his experience during World War I, his period of fame and his flight from fame. The book ends with Segura's death, a beautifully wrought meditation on what part of a self is always with us, and what part is made by the ties we form with the outside world.
Why did the author put these two largely unrelated stories together in one novel? He gives us allusive symbols to discover and ponder - blue tables turn up in both stories, glass shards, damaged eyes. We get some tantalizing hints by examining the character's lives: that each life contains a storyline whose meaning we are constantly puzzling out or surprised by; that competence in our craft is our main defense against chaos; that a need to shape and inhabit our own narrative cuts across time and culture. The act of puzzling out what Ondaatje is getting at resonates with our own efforts to puzzle out the paradox of existing complete within our selves but incomplete without others.
All of the main characters are men and women of few words, so it is Ondaatje's authorial voice that creates the "vivid and continuous dream" necessary for captivating fiction. The style is rich, resonant and filled with marvelously observed details of the French and California countrysides. Even if this novel doesn't resolve its plot or yield up its meaning in the conventional way, the skill that went into its creation make the reading of it always engaging and often exhilarating.
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