15. Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
Description via Publishers Weekly
Ondaatje's oddly structured but emotionally riveting fifth novel opens in the Northern California of the 1970s. Anna, who is 16 and whose mother died in childbirth, has formed a serene makeshift family with her same-age adopted sister, Claire, and a taciturn farmhand, Coop, 20. But when the girls' father, otherwise a ghostly presence, finds Anna having sex with Coop and beats him brutally, Coop leaves the farm, drawing on a cardsharp's skills to make an itinerant living as a poker player. A chance meeting years later reunites him with Claire. Runaway teen Anna, scarred by her father's savage reaction, resurfaces as an adult in a rural French village, researching the life of a Gallic author, Jean Segura, who lived and died in the house where she has settled. The novel here bifurcates, veering almost a century into the past to recount Segura's life before WWI, leaving the stories of Coop, Claire and Anna enigmatically unresolved. The dreamlike Segura novella, juxtaposed with the longer opening section, will challenge readers to uncover subtle but explosive links between past and present. Ondaatje's first fiction in six years lacks the gut punch of Anil's Ghost and the harrowing meditation on brutality that marked The English Patient, but delivers his trademark seductive prose, quixotic characters and psychological intricacy.
My Impressions
This was a breathtaking book. I read it in big gulps over two days and am still reeling. I was very caught up in the writing and the lives of the characters.
I couldn't help comparing it to the book I read before this one, Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss ( post here) even though they are really quite different. On the surface, both are beautifully written novels about not-so-nice events that involve a lot of jumps in time and space among the various characters. I said before for Desai's book that it felt like there was a distance and I couldn't quite connect to the characters or their stories. In Ondaatje's book, I felt there was a distance too, but there was also at times, this tangible narrator who was telling us this story so somehow, I could still connect. Another thing I felt was that the ideas in Ondaatje's were more subtle. I said about Desai's that I took notes because there were just so many ideas being presented and explicitly stated but with Ondaatje, there were fewer such instances and they distracted me less from the story. Finally, I felt that there was more understanding and love in Ondaatje's book despite the unhappiness of the events. In Desai's it felt almost uniformly bleak and the little love that was there still felt full of despair. However the one other thing they both share is ambiguous endings, which I personally disliked. I really wanted to know what happens after the endings of both novels.
Ondaatje's oddly structured but emotionally riveting fifth novel opens in the Northern California of the 1970s. Anna, who is 16 and whose mother died in childbirth, has formed a serene makeshift family with her same-age adopted sister, Claire, and a taciturn farmhand, Coop, 20. But when the girls' father, otherwise a ghostly presence, finds Anna having sex with Coop and beats him brutally, Coop leaves the farm, drawing on a cardsharp's skills to make an itinerant living as a poker player. A chance meeting years later reunites him with Claire. Runaway teen Anna, scarred by her father's savage reaction, resurfaces as an adult in a rural French village, researching the life of a Gallic author, Jean Segura, who lived and died in the house where she has settled. The novel here bifurcates, veering almost a century into the past to recount Segura's life before WWI, leaving the stories of Coop, Claire and Anna enigmatically unresolved. The dreamlike Segura novella, juxtaposed with the longer opening section, will challenge readers to uncover subtle but explosive links between past and present. Ondaatje's first fiction in six years lacks the gut punch of Anil's Ghost and the harrowing meditation on brutality that marked The English Patient, but delivers his trademark seductive prose, quixotic characters and psychological intricacy.
My Impressions
This was a breathtaking book. I read it in big gulps over two days and am still reeling. I was very caught up in the writing and the lives of the characters.
I couldn't help comparing it to the book I read before this one, Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss ( post here) even though they are really quite different. On the surface, both are beautifully written novels about not-so-nice events that involve a lot of jumps in time and space among the various characters. I said before for Desai's book that it felt like there was a distance and I couldn't quite connect to the characters or their stories. In Ondaatje's book, I felt there was a distance too, but there was also at times, this tangible narrator who was telling us this story so somehow, I could still connect. Another thing I felt was that the ideas in Ondaatje's were more subtle. I said about Desai's that I took notes because there were just so many ideas being presented and explicitly stated but with Ondaatje, there were fewer such instances and they distracted me less from the story. Finally, I felt that there was more understanding and love in Ondaatje's book despite the unhappiness of the events. In Desai's it felt almost uniformly bleak and the little love that was there still felt full of despair. However the one other thing they both share is ambiguous endings, which I personally disliked. I really wanted to know what happens after the endings of both novels.