Michael Ondaatje
Hardcover | Pages: 273 pages Rating: 3.5 | 10434 Users | 1528 Reviews
Identify Books Toward Divisadero
| Original Title: | Divisadero |
| ISBN: | 0307266354 (ISBN13: 9780307266354) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Setting: | California(United States) France |
| Literary Awards: | Scotiabank Giller Prize Nominee (2007), Governor General's |
| Literary Awards: | / Prix littéraires du Gouverneur général for Fiction (2007) |
Explanation Supposing Books Divisadero
From the celebrated author of The English Patient and Anil's Ghost comes a remarkable, intimate novel of intersecting lives that ranges 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. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it 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 moves back and forth through time and place, we find each of the characters trying to find some foothold in a present shadowed by the past.Details About Books Divisadero
| Title | : | Divisadero |
| Author | : | Michael Ondaatje |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 273 pages |
| Published | : | May 29th 2007 by Knopf Publishing Group |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Cultural. Canada. Novels. Literary Fiction. Contemporary |
Rating About Books Divisadero
Ratings: 3.5 From 10434 Users | 1528 ReviewsNotice About Books Divisadero
There is not much I can write about Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero without echoing what all the other reviewers have already written: Ondaatje is a craftsman. His writing reveals decades of self-scrutiny, of each year wanting to say more with fewer words.Divisadero is about love and the loss thereof. Love falls victim to the jealous wrath of a protective father, to drug addiction, to the minor details of our daily lives, and the greater mystery of the entropy of desire:Lucien and his future wifeBailed on page 75. The opening scenario was gripping, but then one of the women is in France and seems to be falling in love with a Romani dude, and things turn cloyingly horrible. I refuse on principle to finish a book that has this sentence in it: "All over the world there must be people like us, Anna had said then, wounded in some way by falling in love seemingly the most natural of acts." Just no. No! Nooooooo!
I very much enjoyed this book. But it was a little confusing toward the end. so I think it may need a second read. I came away with beautiful imagery of how people, specifically all the main characters fragment themselves. I think that the format of the book is also a story/metaphor of this fragmentation. I'm not saying that any of his other books has straight forward, linear, single protagonist narration, but this literally felt like the narration was shattering towards the end into more and
For those who have not read an Ondaatje book before, "Divisadero" may not be a good first start. A newer reader may be expecting a plot that rises and crashes as much as the one developed in "The English Patient," which Ondaatje became known best for after the success of the film version. (And even if you haven't watched the movie 10 times over like some of us, you get it: War, lust, affair, secrets, heartbreak, the end.)But for those who have eaten, lived and breathed his words relentlessly
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
Great story that describes the lives of a multitude of interesting characters, living in different times and different areas. The connections between them feel natural and make the whole a fascinating read.
This book is full of the wisdom of a writer who is both a poet and a novelist. Divisadero: the divisions between our lives and the lives of others, and even between our most secret lives inside of us too secret to admit to ourselves. Divisadero: the connections between the divisions that cause us to yearn for the comfort of togetherness, of intimacy. On a palimpsest of a novel painted over by centuries of division and that longing for togetherness, Ondaatje brushes words that will stay with me
0 Comments