by Michael Ondaatje
Alfred A Knopf
276 pages, $25

The title of Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel, “Divisadero,” comes from the Spanish word for “division,” or “to gaze at something from a distance.” The book tells the story of how a number of events, especially an incident of great violence, separate and scatter the lives of three individuals who grew up together, and how memories of their common pas haunt and deform their divided lives. As the principal narrator, Anna, says, “It is the hunger, what we do not have, that holds us together.”

Ondaatje was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1943. After his parents separated in 1954, he moved to England with his mother, and then to Canada in 1962, where he now lives and teaches. He is probably best known for his novel “The English Patient,” which won the Booker Prize and was made into a popular 1996 movie. Ondaatje is a prolific writer: five novels, a memoir, many poetry collections, a nonfiction book on film, and several films.

“Divisadero” has a discontinuous structure. The several plot lines are not brought to a clear resolution, and the book ends in a much earlier era than when it begins. In a previous work, “In the Skin of a Lion,” Ondaatje wrote, “The first sentence of every novel should be: ‘Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.’ Meander if you want to get to town.” It is certainly advice that he follows.

The book opens on a farm in northern California. There is a father (whose name we never learn), two 11-year-old daughters, Claire and Anna, and a hired hand, Coop, who is four years older than the girls and who also lives on the farm. The group formed in a highly unusual way. Anna and Claire are daughters of two different mothers who both died during childbirth the same week at the same hospital. Claire has no other living relatives, so Anna’s father brings both girls home to live with him. When Coop was four, living on a neighboring farm, the rest of his family was beaten to death by their hired hand, and as a result he too is taken in by Anna’s father.

When Anna is 16, she and Coop sleep together. Her father discovers them making love several weeks later and goes into a violent rage, beating Coop with a three-legged stool. Afraid that her father will kill Coop, Anna stabs a piece of broken glass into his shoulder. Immediately after this horrible confrontation, Coop and Anna leave the farm and go their separate ways. Claire maintains a sporadic relationship with the father, but moves to San Francisco, where she works for an idealistic public defender.

Years later, Coop is living a peripatetic life as a gambler, after several unusual and amusing characters teach him how to win (and cheat) at poker. This lifestyle eventually leads to a violent episode with a group of professional gamblers who beat him so badly that he loses all of his memory. At this point, Claire—whom he of course does not remember—reenters his life. The book ends with her driving him back to the old farm, hoping to stimulate his recovery. In a story in which memory of the past plays a dominant role in the characters’ lives and thoughts, it is interesting that Coop is the only one freed from the past.

The reader learns that Anna, the “serious one” who seeks “a determined path,” has become a writer and an archivist who “plunders the past.” She lives in southern France researching the life of an obscure French poet, Lucien Segura.

Anna has an affair with a musician named Rafael, a talented and passionate gypsy guitarist. But like the other romantic relationships in “Divisadero,” it is clear that the affair is only temporary. In the novel, romantic relationships seem generally predictable and idealized. All lovers “remain mysterious to each other ... They’d really been discovering themselves.” There is an unconscious desire to remain strangers in order to maintain impermanence.

The redemptive, healing power of art is an underlying current in the novel. A famous statement by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche appears both at the beginning and end of the story: “We have art so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.” This is often interpreted as a warning against overly materialistic and scientific views of life; here, the quote seems to stress the importance of looking beyond life’s literal facts and damaging experiences to find hope and a broader perspective through art.

“The raw truth of an episode never ends ... the story of my time with Coop (is) endless to me,” Anna says. “The past is always carried into the present by small things.” She also indicates that art can be a refuge. “With memory, with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways. We can circle time,” she says. “Sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves.” She adds that Rafael, her lover, “discovered (at an early age) the privacy of music, its hidden chords ... From then on, conflicts were to be within his art.”

The overall structure of the novel is not completely satisfying—the parts don’t quite fit together in a good balance. In particular, the final section on the dead French poet’s life seems too long and insufficiently connected to the rest of the story.
But “Divisadero” is beautifully written. Ondaatje is an inventive storyteller with wonderful descriptive abilities. Like Anna, the author “works where art meets life in secret.”