Divisadero Was A Book Divided
Posted in Books on 03/24/2010 09:00 pm by JennOndaatje, Michael. Divisadero. Vintage Canada (2008). Originally published in 2007.
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.
Divisaderotakes 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.
I expected big things after having read Anil’s Ghost, but I felt that this novel just fell short of my expectations. The book was split into three parts and it switches between Anna, Claire and Coop’s lives at first. Anna is in France researching an author, Coop is getting involved in and then leaving the gambling scene, Claire is trying to reconcile the past with the present. The first to parts of the book follow these three characters and explores how their lives have been affected by a traumatic incident in their past. All of a sudden the third part of the book shifts and is about the author that Anna is researching. It felt like a completely different book.
At the end, the original characters are not really revisited and the author’s end is inferred. I was disappointed that we didn’t get back into Anna, Claire and Coop’s lives as I found that was slightly more interesting. I kept trying to look for parallels between the author’s story and the three character’s lives to try to determine why his story was the third part of the book, but I didn’t get it. I feel like I was missing something that would make me go “Aha! Now it makes sense!” Perhaps I was, or perhaps it just isn’t there.
I read this for my personal Governor General Award Winner for Fiction Challenge. Because I found the first two parts interesting, and I am not sure I fully understood the book, I am giving this book…














