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Imagine being Michael Ondaatje surveying the world. It seems he can be almost anywhere and that’s his perspective, a perspective he shares with his readers. When I knew Michael best, southeastern Ontario translated through his precise and startling images into authenticity on the page that was especially affirming to those of us whose lives converged in that region with his own. By then, though, he had written as a virtual Australian and mythopoeic American and would go on to write about New Orleans, Italy, North Africa, Sri Lanka, and Toronto as if from separate lifetimes of memory. Like the chameleon, or more like the octopus that changes not only its colour but the texture of its flesh, he is where he is. That is his genius; but the corollary to being home everywhere is being home nowhere at all and there is something about this that is unbearably lonely. Loneliness comes across in his writing not through character or plot or poetic conceit but through place as an intrinsic dimension of the human condition. We feel lonely reading Michael Ondaatje. It is an unsettling experience, being lonely among words of such exacting beauty.
His newest novel, Divisadero, lets you know where you are when it opens by the sound of the breeze in a tree: northern California. Circling around like a raptor amused by his prey, he slowly closes in on a particular time, the 1970s, and on an improbable family-twin sisters who are unrelated, a brother who is not a brother, and an unknowable father. This is Ondaatje country, where the strange is inevitable and the everyday is strange. Then just when the reader feels the landscape at a gut level, through Ondaatje’s trademark rendering of exquisitely detailed violence, the world shifts. Like Alice, we are tumbled into an alternate reality where playing-cards rule. For a while, poker tables of Nevada displace the smell of horses and cedars. There is nothing of nature-even human nature is pared to the bone-as card mechanics deal grimly from the middle of the deck. And yet the words are crisply evocative-one hesitates to say images, for Ondaatje is a master ‘mechanic’ of evocative diction-and briefly his narrative replaces one authenticity with another.
But then comes Europe and his knack for defining place falters, perhaps because the details are given no context, like objects in a William Carlos Williams poem (and, in fact, in this segment Ondaatje playfully offers an empty wheelbarrow going nowhere). A disconcertingly vapid locale in south-central France hosts an affair in which passion, intimacy, and affection seem curiously at odds with each other. One of the twins, Anna, still traumatized by the convergence of sex and violence in her California childhood, is researching a dead writer, while her sister, Claire, riding horses back in the Sierras, also continues to suffer from the same event in her own separate world. Anna becomes involved with a brooding and vaguely exotic counterhero. In characteristic Ondaatje fashion, the lovers share emotions but not feelings. Haunted by their own ghosts, secretive with their own secrets, they never become real to each other. The absence of empathy is contagious. From outside the text, they seem interesting as perhaps mirrors of common insecurities, but like mirrors they are intrinsically empty themselves.
Stories strangely commingle. There seems to be no effort to orchestrate the fragments. Anna and Claire submerge or subvert identities, merge and exchange who they are with no particular urgency. Coop, their quasi-brother, unrelated to either, after becoming Anna’s first lover is beaten terribly by their father, and is later beaten senseless, literally; his identity is beaten right out of him. Anna’s quasi-Romany lover reveals little of himself, but his story connects him to Lucien Segura, the writer in whose rambling house she is now living, and whom she is researching. And of course there is a thief; there is always a thief, Ondaatje’s preferred persona for the writer as artist, just as the researcher stands for the artist as journeyman in thrall with the past. We are told back-stories that lead nowhere and given brief gnomic episodes that shrug off any attempt at thematic or lyric relevance. Eventually, the narrative abandons the present and slips into a past in which lovers pose as siblings and literary allusions provide details more real than surroundings.
A.S. Byatt in Possession explores the resonant distances between a dead writer and a living one. Carol Shields did the same, as have others. It is a fertile conceit. Conversations between the past and the present, between sensibilities already, if enigmatically, exposed and those still unexplored promise unexpected turns of plot or revelation. But is it enough to cast a few well-turned lines across the abyss, then swing over them into the past and leave the frame story behind? Maybe it works and I just don’t get it. No critic or reviewer wants to be the one to dismiss The Double Hook or Moby Dick.
Divisadero presents as a poem, a dramatic monologue. The voice holding it all together is solemn, somewhat pontifical, and exceptionally self-assured. When Ondaatje’s usually unerring sense of place falters in France, the voice intones place names as if they were geographical features. When coincidence in characters’ lives seems improbable, a literary self-consciousness reminds us this is fiction, not life. When identities merge or converge, when every relationship is an analogue, when lives become allusions and characters hover between central casting and Great Books origins, the voice of the poet, who is usually unseen, makes it all the expression of a singular vision
Quotation marks are for the most part abjured. Each character, dressed in images connecting to a narrative thread, speaks in a voice common to all and largely inseparable from the text as a whole. Sometimes the voice suggests a discursive authorial presence, sometimes it seems a disguise. The following is from a single short passage: “How we are almost nothing.” (That is the entire sentence, the opening of a paragraph.) “We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe . . . ” (This is declared without irony). “Years later, if he had been able to look back . . . ” (An indeterminate future is both offered and withheld.) Sometimes this voice adds wisdom, or references to popular culture, or enigmatic asides, or a soulful aura of loneliness, a hurt urgency, that without being understood is genuinely moving.
Who thinks this: “All my life I have loved travelling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behavior of the other . . . Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said . . . We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.” We all do. The sentiment is familiar, contemporary, tentatively poststructural. It could be Anna or Claire or Coop or the old writer, Segura, or Rafael, Anna’s Johnny Depp-like lover. Or Michael Ondaatje, or the reader. What we have here is conservative anarchy, where the isolated psyche and theories of being converge. Vintage Ondaatje: the sentiments carefully radical, their expression radically precise.
This novel is filled with the lovely gems of elusive meaning that the reader expects from Ondaatje. Unlike so many poet-novelists in Canada, from Atwood to Bowering to Kroetsch to Urquhart, he does not pursue the genres as separate practices. His poetry has a strong narrative quality, while his fiction plays with words and images, echo, and allusion, inspired as much by jazz as the Great Tradition. Sometimes, as in Coming Through Slaughter, it is hard to separate poetry from prose, or one genre of prose from another, and the text powerfully rejects the need or desire to do so. In The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, poetry prevails; in The English Patient, it resonates beneath the surface, rising occasionally through fissures in the narrative flow to startle with beauty, haunt with disturbing gestures of sensitivity.
Often, in his writing, Ondaatje turns a phrase to make of the obscure an image so undeniable, the language shudders. He is an alchemist of sorts, making the awkward just right, the empty fulfilling. Yet, in Divisadero, named with thematic efficiency for a street in San Francisco, there are too many instances where obscurity confounds, and the words remain words. Nothing could be better than, “Monsieur Q surveyed the garden and gathered branches and clarified the flower beds.” Clarified the flower beds! Or: “Coop watches Lina walk over and mount her horse, supple as a scarf . . .” Or: “He felt the man could have folded her into some part of his clothing and made her disappear.” But there is something tired about: “. . . she works in archives and discovers every past but her own,” and “ . . . anything peaceful has a troubled past.” The conflation of the vague and the obvious seems indulgent: “ . . . precise as a utility in the way he moved,” or “ . . . turning with an un-bloodlike intelligence,” or “It wasn’t the beauty, it was the variousness,” or “Just for the epaulette of such a name.” Ondaatje’s readers expect more.
Michael Ondaatje will win awards for this novel. As the late Tom Marshall, himself a poet, novelist, and critic, used to say with expansive generosity: people like giving Michael awards. Sometimes the decision to do so may waver, but prevailing cultural currents and the winds of taste and judgement often converge, even if it means he shares the prize with his peers. In 2000 his novel, Anil’s Ghost, shared the Giller prize with David Adams Richards’s Mercy Among the Children; in 1992 The English Patient shared the Booker Prize with Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger; in 1970 The Collected Works of Billy the Kid shared the Governor General’s Award with four works by bpNichol, including The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid; in 1967 he shared the E.J. Pratt Award with Wayne Clifford. It is difficult, sometimes, to differentiate between multiplication and division. My two children I love no less than if I had one, but, had I two lovers, I doubt I could love either with all my heart. Ondaatje collects prizes, and like lovers they complement his desire. It’s hard to know what to make of this (a phenomenon not wholly without precedent: Alden Nowlan and Eli Mandel shared the GG in ’67). Perhaps nothing at all.
John Moss (Books in Canada)


From Publishers Weekly
Davis (American Splendor) reads Ondaatje's puzzle of a novel delicately, as if hesitant to jostle a single piece out of place. Often playing emotionally frazzled characters on screen, Davis is far more understated here in offering up Ondaatje's hybrid narrative—one that goes from 1970s San Francisco to early 20th-century France, linking past and present with loose tendrils of memory and history. She does a fine job with the tricky French names and nomenclature, and puts her natural gifts as an actor to good use with her subtle, understated, well-oiled reading. Davis still sounds as no-nonsense as ever, but her skilled reading offers a good deal more patience and tenderness than her often-testy characters do.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

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Disappointing, Oct 25 2007 By  James Braxton (Newberry) - See all my reviews There's much to enjoy in this new Ondaatje novel--all his usual gifts are on display--but I was disappointed. First, it seems too many serious writers these days are obsessed with writing itself as a metaphor for life and all its existential complexity. Ondaatje tries to include the 'world' in his tortured literary effort--e.g., clunky references to the two Gulf Wars--but in the end the novel and its concerns feel terribly self-involved and self-referential, like he's finally given into a private world just as his characters Lucien Segura, Rafael, and Anna have done. Art as an escape from truth. Nietzsche deserves a better interpretation! Second, I found it needlessly confusing. I know we're not supposed to admit this -- we're supposed to pretend that it all makes sense--but does it? Early on Anna recounts a shared memory in the barn with her sister Claire. She says that 'even now' they remember it differently. When is even now? She runs away from home and never goes back as far as we know, so when do she and Anna get together and compare memories? Also, how can her telling of Lucien's life story contain resonances with Coop's life after she left, a life of which she knows nothing? Are we to believe in magic here, or are we to believe that the family at some point reunites? Don't get me wrong, the book is a pleasurable serious read. I read it in one sitting (one long plane ride). But it became increasingly disappointing as it went on. He refuses to tell a straight story--I get it--but the (perhaps) unintended effect of his narrative stubbornness is that as the book went on I wanted basically one thing: to know what happened to Coop, whom he abandons at mid-book. You can't just create a character and a story line as compelling as this one and then throw it away as if it started to smell bad to you. It smacks of an author who might disdain his own readers. Also, if you missed Tino Georgiou's masterful novel--The Fates, go and read it.It is the first novel of the century that could rightly be called a masterpiece

An Innovative Philosophical Novel about the Nature of Identity and Perception, Sep 18 2007 By  Donald Mitchell "400 Times More Income for Yo... (founder of the 400 Year Project to demonstrate how to make improvements 20 times faster -- www.fastforward400.com -- in Boston) - See all my reviews       Divisadero will appeal most to those who are deeply interested in identity and perception. This is one of those rare novels that successful explores a philosophical issue, much as Dostoyevsky does with Crime and Punishment. If, however, you are looking to a traditional novel about one person or a family, you'll find the dream-like shards of this book disturbing and difficult . . . rather than rewarding. You might want to read another novel instead. Let me take you into Mr. Ondaatje's theme. Who are you? Most people would answer in terms of their name, their associations, their work, where they live, and their experiences. Michael Ondaatje demonstrates a different point of view; you are who you want to be. You can choose to die to who you were born and become someone else. The ease of doing that is increased if you go where no one knows you. But, your perceptions will be permanently framed by your life experiences in a way you cannot escape. Witness the excellent advice to first novelists: Write what you know. If you do that, you can change who you are (become a novelist) but you'll see the world through the lens of your experience even when you shift your focus to new ground. The primary character in this book, Anna, lives this experience. She grows up in a twin-like existence with an adopted sister, Claire, and a near-brother, the neighbor boy Coop, who works as a hand for her family. The distance between them is broken when Anna and Coop begin to want more from one another. That idyll is broken by an event so terrible it will stay with you in nightmares. Nothing can remain the same. But what will happen? The story develops from there to follow the disconnected lives of Anna, Claire, and Coop. Anna becomes a writer and Divisadero continues in investigating her research and writing about a poet and novelist. From there, Mr. Ondaatje peels the onion once more to take you into the life of the poet and novelist and his identity and perceptions. As the stories play out, you'll be fascinated by many sub themes such as the way that we are often twinned with another. How do such twins develop separate identities? In addition, Mr. Ondaatje describes a universe that seems to be operated by unseen hands or laws that cause memes and experiences to recur. After finishing the book, I was struck by how much meaning Mr. Ondaatje was able to draw out of a tragic event. I suggest you mull over the same point and spend some time thinking about what has happened to you . . . in terms of its meaning, rather than just its lessons. Great work, Mr. Ondaatje!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful: Michael, is it me or are you losing your touch?, Jul 27 2007 By  Geoff Low "Big Dreams" (Toronto, ON, Canada) - See all my reviews Having been impressed by Anil's Ghost and The English Patient (both also by Michael Ondaatje), I was eager to pick up his latest offering. I found the story to be, in a word, BITTERSWEET. The sweet interest that he ropes you in with in the beginning of the story quickly turns sour when the characters split up and the story separates into three different strands. Tracking along with their estranged lives seems empty, but Ondaatje does weave things nicely to a close through yet another different story. Hmmm.

Deserves the Booker Prize., Jun 13 2007 By  A. Lakusta - See all my reviews    It is difficult to write a review for a novel that rises above superlatives. Ondaatje is one of the world's greatest living writers, and Divisadero is his finest novel. At times it rises to the level of true greatness, and it is the most challenging novel I have ever read. It is also my new favorite. Be forewarned: this is not a light read. The prose is smooth and lyrical and unmistakably Ondaatje. The novel focuses on memory, the past, and violence as his prior works have but Divisadero takes the concept one step further: it is separated into three distinct sections, overlapping enough only to give the reader a reason to continue reading. It reads more like a collection of three novellas than it does a novel. It also travels in reverse chronological order. I considered the opening section to be the main story, with the following stories as the reflections spoken of in the last line of the novel. This is not a novel that concerns itself heavily with plot. It is an exploration of its themes first and foremost. I do not want to speak for the author, but it seems to me it was not written to be a page turner. If that is what you are expecting I think you will probably be disappointed. Any hope of that will be gone with the abrupt end to the opening section. But do not give up because of it. There are many novels with compelling stories: there are few that treat its reader with as much respect as Divisadero. Ondaatje tells you a story, but not all of it. He leaves the unwritten to the reader to piece together. What does it mean that Coop/Anna and Segura both have blue tables they treasure? What does it mean that Coop becomes a card player and Segura names Ramon's sidekick "One-eyed Jaques"? What does it mean that the colors of Anna?s five flags are all represented in Segura's story, from the color of Marie-Neige's dress to the white mucus of diphtheria? My hat is off to you if you were able to decipher their meanings on your first read. But multiple readings are exactly what this book is all about. I am not sure I agree with the Amazon description of the links between past and present as being "explosive", but they are definitely meaningful, and I would argue they are the core of the novel. I never -- NEVER -- reread books within a year, but this is going to be a notable exception. This novel in one word: Haunting. It will stay with you for a long time. Ondaatje is a master.

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• Subjects > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( O ) > Ondaatje, Michael
• Subjects > Literature & Fiction > Canadian > Asian Canadian > Authors, A-Z > Ondaatje, Michael
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• Subjects > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Canadian > Poets, A-Z > Ondaatje, Michael

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