Divisadero (Vintage International) - Softcover

Ondaatje, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307279324 ISBN 13: 9780307279323

Publisher: Vintage, 1900

Synopsis

From the celebrated author of The English Patient and Anil's Ghost comes a remarkable, intimate novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time. In the 1970s in Northern California 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 shattered by an incident of violence that sets fire to the rest of their lives. Divisadero takes us from San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada's casinos and eventually to the landscape of southern France. As the narrative moves back and forth through time and place, we find each of the characters trying to find some foothold in a present shadowed by the past.

About this title

Review:

"Ravishing and intricate. . . . Unforgettable." --Pico Iyer, The New York Review of Books"My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje. . . . [Divisadero is] a mosaic of profound dignity, with an elegiac quietude that only the greatest of writers can achieve. . . . Ondaatje's finest novel to date." --Jhumpa Lahiri"The more you give Divisadero, the more it gives in return . . . . [Ondaatje] is a writer of intense acuity." --The New York Times"Brilliant. . . . Divisadero plays whimsically with chronology and memory, with fantasy and historical fact." --San Francisco Chronicle

From the Publisher:

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
cinemas 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

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1900
• ISBN 10: 0307279324
• ISBN 13: 9780307279323
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288