Reader's Guide for Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero

Part One: Anna, Claire, and Coop

Before the story begins, Anna writes “For I have taken myself away from who I was with them, and what I used to be.” Why do you think she says that she is no longer who she once was? How do you think her statement manifests itself in the rest of the novel?

When Coop rises from the water tower he sees Anna and Claire, but “when he was back in the darkness of the water tank, there was just a retrospective image of the two girls.” How do images and identity work in this passage? Consider that there is a “tree branch partially concealing their identities.” Why do you think the concealment of their identities may be significant?

Anna explains that after the horse attacked her and Claire, “it was Coop who had found us that evening in the barn and mistook our identities…and I thought, then I am not Anna, then that must be Anna over there” (20). Why does Anna identify herself, or lose her identity, because of Coop’s words?

How does Anna’s total immersion in literature compare to Cooper’s gambling or Claire’s horse-back riding? What are the similarities or differences in their addictions? Do you think there is a risk in Anna’s addiction to hiding “within art” (142)?

The first part ends when Claire takes Coop to their old house to meet their adopted father again after he loses his memory to physical trauma. After this chapter, the novel focuses on the life of Lucien Segura. Why do you think the novel makes such an abrupt narrative transition?

Part Two: The Family in the Cart

Why do you think Ondaatje makes the transition from part one to part two so sudden? Consider the length of part two compared with parts one and three. Why do you think part two is so brief? Why do you think the focus of the novel shifts from Anna, Claire, and Cooper to Lucien Segura?

What do you think is significant about the flying peacock at the beginning of part two? Why might a peacock, something normally considered bright and colorful, disguise its shape behind a tree branch? Do you think the peacock’s blending into the tree may correspond to the way many of the characters are hiding from their pasts?

On page 175, Aria’s husband describes himself as being unimportant to his wife. Why do you think the husband thinks he is unimportant to Aria? Why do you think he says that he is just attached to her and her world? How do you think this relates to the way Cooper is attached to Bridget, or the way in which Anna is attached to Raphael?

Why do you think the thief changes his name so often? How do you think this relates to the way in which Anna’s desire to remain anonymous? Why do you think the characters in Divisadero seem to be fragmented to the point that they take on the likeness of one another?

What do you think about the fact that Ondaatje’s Divisadero describes Lucien Segura as living “mostly an imaginary life”? He seems to literally interact with the fictional characters he creates. How might this affect how you read the sections of the novel which are told from Segura’s point of view?

Part Three: The House in Dému

How does Lucien’s essay regarding the clock-maker and his love for the “performance of the craft” mirror Anna’s metaphor of her emotions as a villanelle? The novel seems to argue, alongside Nietzsche, that art is a refuge from “truth.” Does fiction ultimately offer sanctity for either Anna or Lucien? What about the implied author of Divisadero?

What do you think about Lucien’s comment that “the true portrait was the photograph in his study”? What might it mean that life requires a photograph, or a representation of what has taken place, to reveal the “truth”? What might this suggest about art’s ability to represent life?

What do you think about Marie-Neige’s statement that Lucien was already partially blind before his accident and that he “had never veered much into the real world”? How might Lucien’s insistence on experiencing life only through his art relate to Nietzsche’s statement that “we have art so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth”?

What do you think about the reappearance of Anna as the narrator at the end of the novel? Anna claims that “with memory, with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways. We can circle time….So I find the lives of Coop and my sister and my father everywhere…as they perhaps still concern themselves with my absence, wherever they are.” Do you think that it is possible that Divisadero, with all of its different characters and stories, has really been Anna’s story all along?

After finishing the novel, who do you think crafts the primary fiction of the story, Anna or Lucien? How does the novel provide evidence for both? What is the importance of Anna and Lucien’s status as “authors”? What does it mean to be an author in this novel?

-- Dana Morency