Michael Ondaatje's

Divisadero and its Haunting Elegance

With memory, with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways.  We can circle time.  A paragraph or an episode from another era will haunt us in the night, as the words of a stranger can. 

Michael Ondaatje, the Booker-Prize-winning author of The English Patient, extends and develops his lyrical prose and structural complexity in Divisadero (2007), his fifth novel.  Divisadero is divided into three sections: “Anna, Claire and Coop” (a contemporary narrative of a ruptured family set in northern California); “The Family in the Cart” (the story of Rafael – a French guitarist and future lover of Anna); and “The House in Demu” (the narrative of the French poet Lucien Segura who was an avuncular presence in Rafael’s life and whose work became the subject of Anna’s scholarly research).  The simultaneous brilliance and challenge of Divisidero reside in the book’s layered scaffolding of section, character, geography and time.  Unlike a more conventional chronological novel, Divisadero and its sweeping, sometimes fragmented, sections require the reader to participate actively in the narrative’s construction.  As in the reconstruction of memory itself, the elisions and absences in the novel become as important as the clearly rendered, lyrical scenes.

And Michael Ondaatje’s prose in Divisadero is as lyrical and artful as any being written today.  In the following scene, Anna recalls the moment in the barn where she and her sister Claire “stepped suddenly into the large uncertain world of adults.”  In the memory, Claire and Anna are attending to Claire’s horse, Territorial, when the horse suddenly startles and lurches:

For a moment Claire had been staring at me, who had already been knocked down by the attacking horse, and then the same horse had swerved out of the darkness and turned on her, and her senses closed down.  Or maybe she remained like me, half awake on the concrete floor—I felt I could see sparks and flame to represent the loudness.  The animal must have been crazed, claustrophobic, for it raced up and down the passageway, slipping on straw and concrete, banging into wood walls, charging the length of the barn, turning once more at the blocked exit, its eyes and heart frantic. (18-19) 

When Coop finds the two young women slipping in and out of consciousness in the barn later, Anna tells us,

We were both fifteen years old then, when Coop finally entered the barn and crouched down beside me and called me ‘Claire.’  So that Claire herself became confused, uncertain for a moment as to who she was.  But she was Claire, with what would become a thin scar like the path of an almost dried tear under her left eye, where all that blood had escaped. (19)

Coop’s literal confusion of Anna and Claire in the scene becomes a resonating motif throughout the novel.  Not only is the understanding of physical identity questioned in the novel, but the boundaries of emotional and existential identity (even the boundaries of geography, nationality and time) continually evolve to resist any singular or pat encapsulation.

In many ways, Ondaatje’s narrative scaffolding is orchestral.  A single voice introduces a motif (such as the motif of transposable identity above, or, say, the motif in The English Patient of the willful obfuscation of identity) and that motif builds and resonates with other voices until ultimately the layers of the motif combine to create a fuller and more consonant sound.  In the heavily manicured market of contemporary popular and literary fiction, Michael Ondaatje’s work emanates depth and craft, bristling at the predictable and easy.  For the intrepid reader, Ondaatje’s lyrical and layered novel will carry both satisfaction and challenge.

--Jonathan Fink, Assistant Professor of English,

UWF Department of English