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Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje

I loved Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, both the novel and the film and therefore approached this first Ondaatje novel for seven years with a high level of anticipation. At first, I was not disappointed.

The first strand of the novel  Divisadero concerns a farmer and his teenage daughters. Claire was adopted when Anna’s mother died in childbirth – Claire’s mother had also died. Coop is also adopted into the family and rivalry for his love develops between the two girls. Anna wins his love, but a dramatic incident breaks the family up forever.

We would love to follow this story to its conclusion but Ondaatje takes us into two different environments. We follow Coop into a gambling career where he is finally beaten senseless and suffers total amnesia. Claire comes to his rescue and is at last able to adopt the role of Anna. She takes him to visit the father who raised him. Sadly for the reader who enjoys conclusions, this strand of the story is never completed.

Instead, we find Anna, who is fleeing the past that has scarred her so. In a France that seems unnecessarily idyllic and literary for those of us who live in the real country, Anna is writing and researching the life of Lucien Segura.

We travel back into Segura’s past and also follow the thread of the roma people who share his life. The novel shifts in time and place until we feel there is no coherence in the narrative, except, pehaps in the themes that are common to the different threads.

This is not a novel for the reader who requires a beginning, a middle and an end. However, it is written in beautiful evocative language – a work of poetry.

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