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Divisadero (Vintage International) Posters
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List Price: $13.95Amazon.com's Price: $11.16 You Save: $2.79 (20%)Prices subject to change.
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780307279323
ISBN: 0307279324
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: April 22, 2008
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: April 22, 2008
Sales Rank: 24573
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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.
Amazon.com Review:
From the celebrated author of The English Patient, comes another breathtaking, unforgettable story, this time about a family torn apart by an act of violence. Divisadero is a rich and rewarding read, one that Jhumpa Lahiri, in her guest review for Amazon.com (see below), calls "Ondaatje's finest novel to date." --Daphne Durham
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 theaters 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
Average Rating: 
Rating: -
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. ... Read More
Rating: -
To integrate Part two with what precedes it you can think that Anna had worked out Lucien's story to that extent or that it is a story by itself. But the fact remains that it does not flow from the story about Coop, Anna and Claire. "Suggestion", says a Sanscrit crtique of poetry, "is the mainstay of great poetry".Divisadero is poetic in places in that sense. Roman takes Marie-liege from behind while she holds on to a barrel of rain-water to support herself "and", Ondaatje writes, " in the nextwhile, ... Read More
Rating:  -
Like the definition of the title, a division or the marking off of some esoteric dividing point in ones life, the book leaves much to be desired. In many ways it follows the work of Annie, who is translating the works and journals of a little known nineteenth century french poet. It's all an academic exercise that serves no purpose except for those in the 'ivory tower' who spend the rest of their time trying to explain why Proust and Kerouac are so important.
The book is described as having ... Read More
Rating:  -
This book represents some of the most sophisticated poetic storytelling around. As is often the case with Ondaatje, his images, language and development of relationships - particularly between Lucien Segura and Marie-Niege - are more interesting than the plot itself, although there is an elegant retention of a mild form of suspense throughout the novel. Ondaatje is a master of developing a memorable story by attention to the diminutive expressions of emotion that bind two people fatefully together. There is ... Read More
Rating: -
I am one of those who thoroughly enjoys Ondaatje's writings. Though floaty and dreamlike, his stories always manage to be 'real' enough to me to keep me engaged from beginning to end. And Divisadero didn't disappoint - until I reached the end. I tend to be of the same opinion as some of the other reviewers who felt that Ondaatje ultimately left a little too much to the readers' imaginations. I did feel a wee bit cheated.
But, that said, I thoroughly did enjoy his typical poetic style, the ... Read More
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