Divisadero: Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje’s latest book Divisadero, as the name implies, is a divided book. In the first half, three character’s stories are told: two sisters and the hired hand Coop at the ranch. The first chapter, set in rural California, involves these characters in a tragedy, and each of the character’s stories is spun out separately in subsequent chapters. But halfway through the book, just at the point when I was deeply invested in the characters’ lives, the narrative swivels onto another set of people. These characters are connected thematically to the first crowd, and there are gossamer threads of storyline links, but emotionally, I had to start over, and read the second half as if another novella. It’s a testament to Ondaatje’s swift ability to suck the reader into rapprochement with his characters that I become quickly involved in the second half, set in France.

I can’t help but love Ondaatje’s meditations throughout the book on the significance and possibility of biography – or, more simply, the character’s past. For all of these characters, their past haunts them, and in some ways determines their choices in the present. With most characters, Ondaatje’s shifts time to relate seminal moments in their past, and everyone seems to harbor some hard kernel of pain, lodged inside them since their childhood, that irritates them in the present. This preoccupation with the stages of biography is exemplified by a character we first know as Liebard, who changes his name to Astolphe, and who had changed his name with frequency throughout his life to reflect different periods, as in this excerpt: “He spent the first day imagining moments from his past when he could have been Astolphe, when he might have behaved and participated with more ease and subtlety just for having the epaulette of such a name. It led to the kind of biographical reconsideration a man might make when looking at photographs of a wife or lover in an earlier time, in her teens or twenties, which always brought the wish to have known her then.”

I was put off by only one section – the second section, where Coop learns how to cheat at Texas Hold ‘Em. The rage of Texas Hold ‘Em has worn a bit thin, from too much television time and the bandwagon hop from the film industry, and the topic felt out of place in such a novel where improbable and seductive affairs flowered without even a hint of relationship cliché. Thankfully, the poker playing wasn’t a major facet of the novel, only a brief spell in a fragmented work where the characters lives shone with a brief, yet unresolved, luminosity.

Those are some of my initial thoughts – truncated from what I wanted to write, but at least true in their brevity. No matter what my opinion of the book, all you English Patient fans will ratchet up the sales, but I say go ahead. Also, sorry for the slow posting this week – I’ve been busy with fiction writing and syllabus creation for composition classes. Will try to be more engaging the next two weeks, before my summer jaunt to South America.