Divisadero

Below is Ms. Jhumpa Lahiri's review of Ondaatje's new book Divisadero. I give you this and will weigh in at the bottom.

My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje. I began Divisadero as soon as it came into my possession and over the course of a few evenings was captivated by Ondaatje's finest novel to date.

The story is simple, almost mythical, stemming from a family on a California farm that is ruptured just as it is about to begin. Two daughters, Anna and Claire, are raised not just as siblings but with the intense bond of twins, interchangeable, inseparable. Coop, a boy from a neighboring farm, is folded into the girls' lives as a hired hand and quasi-brother. Anna, Claire, and Coop form a triangle that is intimate and interdependent, a triangle that brutally explodes less than thirty pages into the book. We are left with a handful of glass, both narratively and thematically.

But Divisadero is a deeply ordered, full-bodied work, and the fragmented characters, severed from their shared past, persevere in relation to one another, illuminating both what it means to belong to a family and what it means to be alone in the world. The notion of twins, of one becoming two, pervades the novel, and so the farm in California is mirrored by a farm in France, the setting for another plot line in the second half of the book and giving us, in a sense, two novels in one. But the stories are not only connected but calibrated by Ondaatje to reveal a haunting pattern of parallels, echoes, and reflections across time and place. Like Nabokov, another master of twinning, Ondaatje's method is deliberate but discreet, and it was only in rereading this beautiful book--which I wanted to do as soon as I finished it--that the intricate play of doubles was revealed.

Every sign of the author's genius is here: the searing imagery, the incandescent writing, the calm probing of life's most turbulent and devastating experiences. No one writes as affectingly about passion, about time and memory, about violence--subjects that have shaped Ondaatje's previous novels. But there is a greater muscularity to Divisadero, an intensity born from its restraint. Episodes are boiled down to their essential elements, distilled but dramatic, resulting in a mosaic of profound dignity, with an elegiac quietude that only the greatest of writers can achieve. --Jhumpa Lahiri

actually, I don't think I have any words fitting to be put next to such an eloquent summation. This book is not a hard read, but definitely a heavy one. I have to take breaths between chapters... to soak it in. to comtemplate. to grieve and grasp the abstract presented with in his physical words. My adoration for Ondaatje stems hugely from his magic trick of showing you each of his cards and then the magic that was always there. No slight of hand but a turn of phrase that equally could be called such.

I also can not wait to finish it so that I can start all over again. Maybe my words will have more coherence then.

The one I am reading now that is an easier bit is A Thousand Splendid Suns. NY Times Bestseller, by the author of Kite Runner... Khalid Houssain (sp?). It moves faster across the Afghani poli-landscape. and makes it personal. It carries depth, pain and flight like Kite Runner did. It holds a similar theme but moves between character perspectives as KR did not.

What I found most impressive (which I am always surprised that I do) is the way he writes women. The way he writes harsh mysogonistic subjects with a minds eye that doesn't seem like it crosses genders. Maybe that is the feminist in me.

Today I am more settled on a whole. This is the week of clean up, professionally. maybe personally too. How does the saying go... when god closes a door he opens up a window?

Some thing are being slammed shut. Bama whispers the existence of a girlfriend... that is being left. I consider rescinding the scheduled big-girl conversation. I am conflicted.

DK is too much. We spit all the time. It is all over the blog. I forgive. We mess up again. I forgive again, but it is not getting better. Yesterday he "suggests" I need to make some decisions on whether or not I want him in my life and how. I am conflicted.

I sit on his porch as we prep to air our grievances. He starts with his take on Rosemary. I leave him on the porch mid-sentence. He does not get to have issues about how I react to his bad behavior. especially since I gave you the benefit of "pleasant conversation" during your needy international calls. that he could look me dead in my face and question why I would grant her the civility of a cup of tea... and chastise me for it... no. in this instance, I am above reproach. and that getting your issue out is more important than how you hurt me... says I knew a long time ago that you were not for me.

and I need to let my bits of hypocrisy go and act like it.