About this title: From the celebrated author of The English Patient and Anil's Ghost comes a remarkable and intimate novel of lives that intersect 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. Their makeshift family 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 ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Date Published: 05/2007
ISBN-13:9780307266354ISBN:0307266354
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 273 p. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780307279323ISBN:0307279324
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Moderate wear on Cover/Interior Pages. (W3) Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 273 p. Vintage International (Paperback). Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780307266354ISBN:0307266354
Description: A wonderful copy with some minor edgewear to the cover. Dust Jacket has some edgewear present. -, Hard Cover, Very Good / Very Good. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780307266354ISBN:0307266354
Description: Good in Good jacket. 28-Y Ex-library. Books rated "Good" may have some notes, underlining, or highlighting. These books also may contain the previous owner's name, stamp, sticker, or gift inscription, or may be library discards. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Purchasing this book supports the King County Library System Foundation. Thriftbooks and KCLSF have partnered to help raise additional funds for the library system. Ex-Library book-will contain library markings. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
"MICHAEL Ondaatje is notorious for his non-linear - hence sometimes frustrating - narratives. Take his most commercially successful novel to date, The English Patient, which netted him the Booker Prize in 1992 and was made into an Oscar-winning movie in 1996.
Though the movie streamlined the plot, focusing on the love story of the titular character, the novel is actually more complex, interweaving the lives of four characters whose stories do not obviously relate to each other, while throwing in all manner of tangents on topics like bomb disposal, map-making and Greek historian Herodotus.
It is fitting, then, that his new novel is titled Divisadero. Named for the Spanish word for "division", it is a street in San Francisco which once marked the border between the city and the fields. "Or it might derive from the word divisar, meaning 'to gaze at something from a distance,'" helpfully adds a character, Anna.
Ondaatje's writing is all about the divisions between his characters, whom he seems to regard from up high as pawns in a sprawling chess game - or, to pick on a motif in the novel, like cards in a poker game - their value lying not so much as individuals, but as tools in service of a larger pattern.
Divisadero Street is where Anna says she comes from, though none of the action actually takes place there. Instead, the novel opens on a farm in California in the 1970s, where a young Anna, her sister Claire, and a older boy Coop live with her widowed father.
Only Anna is actually his blood relative: Claire, who is the same age, was adopted when her mother died at childbirth, as did Anna's. Meanwhole, Coop is a hired hand whom Anna's father took in after his family was brutally murdered.
At the age of 16, Anna and Coop start an unconvincing sexual relationship, which Ondaatje seems to introduce purely so that he can play with the fallout. Like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the reasons for the relationship are irrelevant compared to everyone else's reactions to it.
In this case, when their father eventually catches them in the act, he almost beats Coop to death, stopped only by Anna plunging a shard of glass into her father's shoulder. The two lovers flee, but separately, and it is the last time they see each other.
Anna ends up going to university and becoming an academic, her topic of research being an obscure, early 20th century French poet called Lucien Segura. Coop becomes a professional card shark, and eventually crosses paths again with Claire. Anna's "twin" has become a research assitant for a San Francisco public defender, and is the only one to visit their father on the weekends.
So that's the first half of the book. Living up to its title, this narrative abruptly ends about two-thirds through the novel, which moves on to the story of Lucien. This is apparently written by Anna, who is now in France living in his old house and sleeping with a musician who knew the poet when he was alive.
Entering a whole new narrative more than halfway through the book is at first disconcerting, but eventually Ondaatje plays his hand. This second story mirrors the first, giving a fresh perspective on certain emotions and making the reader second-guess his reactions to certain events.
Parallels include absent parents, distant war, siblings as lovers and lovers as siblings. In an examination of the fluidity of identity, characters keep mixing up each other's names: just as Coop recurringly swaps Anna and Claire's names, Lucien is identified as someone else by his dying lover in a heartbreaking scene.
All this is not told in chronological order. Rather, Ondaatje jumbles up these moments in time, the past and the present overlapping each other, demonstrating, as he writes, "with memory, with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways. We can circle time."
Lucien eventually becomes a commericial success, if anonymously, through his series of romantic adventure novellas which "gave his readers the happiness of a resolution." This is something Ondaatje himself fails to do.
He does something else though. Like poetry, Ondaatje's novels are engaged more in form and emotion, rather than plot development. The pleasure in reading lies in how he expresses and develops certain motifs and themes. As for his characters, they sometimes fail to come across as actual people; yet they resonate as echos and fragments of a collective human psyche."
"I found this book just as a roller coaster ride of ups and downs. When I began reading this book I was intrigued and completely captivated. It seems as though the excitement happened all at once in the beginning. The rest of the book seemed to try to live up to the excitement and life of the beginning but fell short. I anxiously read each page hoping all would end up right. Maybe that was the point of the author in that life is not a fairy tale with happy endings. I also wonder that Anna's father was so willing to "get rid" of her when he caught her and Coop together because of how her and her sister came to be sisters. Was it easy for him to just throw her off to the world because he thought that maybe she really wasn't his and he did his part in taking her in the first place. Do we often think of things in a certain way to justify our actions. I wonder if that was one point the author wanted to bring to everyone's minds. It seems as though with one horrific occurance it is a snow ball effect of bad choices and/or occurrances. Is life really like that? Do we often feel that we are what we are and we can't change it. Why do Coop, Anna, and Claire travel the road of dispare? Is was a complex book, frustrating and intriguing."
"It appears as if the last novel I'll complete this year has turned out to be the best one of the year. It used to be that my life would stop with the appearance of a new Kundera novel, but now that distinction belongs to Ondaatje. Divisadero is like another English Patient, but I mean this in the best sense: it's not a replica of that earlier novel, but a continuation and enlargement of its central themes (nomadism, personal and historical wounds, blurred boundaries between past and present and between individual identities, recurrences and historical coincidences, collage-like approaches to identity and art, etc.). The novel has a shimmering beauty as a whole, but is even more beautiful and mysterious in its constituent parts: its poetic images (of dark forests, shuffled cards, rivers and roads, etc.), its turns of phrase, its compassionate rendering of bruises (both physical and psychic), its lacerating moments of vulnerable and imperiled love. Ondaatje probes the unknown adjacencies of our lives, biographical proximities that, if we were aware of them, would collapse time and space and profoundly reorder our sense of our selves. The indirections of his storytelling seem to fit snugly the shape of our lives and experience of time, and his economies of attention always seem more acute, more exacting, more poetically distilled than almost any other writer working today, giving even the most sparing of his vignettes the power of fully realized portraits. Divisadero loses a little of its power and magic in the final third of the narrative, perhaps because we want to follow Coop and Claire a bit longer."
"God I did not like this book. Really, really did not like it. I read all the 4 and 5 star reviews, I get what people are saying, and I'm just not there. Why get us interested in characters and then abandon them? and why spend time telling us boring things about them (like a whole paragraph describing how she planted seeds in the field by scattering them instead of burying them) and then we find out about major dramatic events only in one passing sentence told as a part of someone else's narrative (like "------ was put in prison for nearly killing a man in a jealous rage"). This was like a bunch of pieces of stories. I get it - Divisadero. They're being divided. Lots and lots of divisions. And yes, we have a dark and stormy night, and bad things happen, and the snow comes down, and people are feeling upset - Isn't this a bit heavy handed? Never mind that setting a book in Northern California should prevent an ice storm from occurring (and no, it doesn't work for me to throw in a line later saying it was a rare event). And the last thing that drove me crazy was how the book just leaves out the How of things. There is no connection from one event to another - you are just supposed to leap. They know each other, and now they are sleeping together. We see no evidence of romance building, but boom there it is. So, it was not believable, and just felt like some clever writerly experiment. Which was not a pleasure to read."
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