Divisadero

by Michael Ondaatje

Reading a novel by Michael Ondaatje is a little like working on a box of puzzle pieces that aren't all necessarily from the same puzzle, but connect enough to give you a few very pretty fragments of the original pictures.

Divisadero is a perfect example of that. There are really about three or four short stories making up this novel, that have some tenuous connections to each other, and are therefore considered to be fragments of a larger narrative, and they go together wonderfully thematically, but don't really leave you with any type of linear story.

The novel begins with Anne and Claire, who have been raised as sisters by a single father (one of the sisters was adopted) on a farm in Northern California; their only other company being Coop, a farmhand that was taken on at the age of four, when his own family died.

Violence splits the family apart, although we do check in with each of the three children in different parts of the book. The final third of the novel is about Lucien Segura, an obscure turn of the century French writer that Anne is researching.

As with all other Ondaatje novels, the plot is secondary to the beauty of the writing. His prose has a flow and shine to it unlike most other writers working today. His characters are always highly iconoclastic and interesting.

This book is not on the level of the English Patient (but then, it's been so long since I read it, perhaps my memory of that book is greater than the book itself), but it was still a pleasure to read.