Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero was a small gift of a thing. Its subject - the fragility of families - is mirrored in the fragile narrative that spreads like a cobweb with tenuous and haphazard links between the characters. I keep finding stories of fathers in my reading travels and this was an interesting one - a silent, dutiful father with moments of explosive temper. A particular moment of temper - violent and truly awful - propels Anna, Claire and Coop into different worlds. Anna, whose identity is riven by this act of violence becomes an academic, being particularly drawn to the story of a writer called Lucien Segura - whose family is as fragmented as her own. Claire becomes a paralegal, making a career out of building a false intimacy with strangers and Coop a high stakes gambler also an artifice of sorts.
Divisadero blends the poetic and the narrative. Ondaatje's sentences are effortlessly beautiful. Like this one from Anna's point of view: "I am a person who discovers archival subtexts in history and art where the spiralling among a handful of strangers tangles into a story." Ondaatje's doesn't over explain his poetry or force closure on his narrative - this spiralling is exactly his method here. It's finding moments of truth, epiphany and hope in the randomness of life.
Divisadero blends the poetic and the narrative. Ondaatje's sentences are effortlessly beautiful. Like this one from Anna's point of view: "I am a person who discovers archival subtexts in history and art where the spiralling among a handful of strangers tangles into a story." Ondaatje's doesn't over explain his poetry or force closure on his narrative - this spiralling is exactly his method here. It's finding moments of truth, epiphany and hope in the randomness of life.
1 comment:
This is an absolutely lovely book. Glad to read your review. I didn't see it that way... that this is a book about the fragility of families.
I recently read a review that was quite unequivocal about saying that the thief in Divisadero (Liebard, a.k.a Astolphe, a.k.a. Rafael's father) is also Caravaggio from The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion. If you're familiar with those books, I'd be curious to know if you agree about Caravaggio. (I haven't been able to find any evidence myself to suggest that Liebard is Caravaggio.)
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