2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist, Part 2

Posted 31 October, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Scotiabank Giller Prize |

Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje. McClelland & Stewart, $34.99 cloth, 278 pp., ISBN: 978-0-7710-6872-0.

Previous Scotiabank Giller Prize nominations/wins: 2000, Anil’s Ghost, winner

Other awards (selected): 2000, Governor General’s Award for Fiction (Anil’s Ghost)

2000, Irish Times International Fiction Prize (Anil’s Ghost)

2000, Prix Médicis (Anil’s Ghost)

2000, Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize (Anil’s Ghost)

1992, Booker Prize (The English Patient)

1992, Governor General’s Award for Fiction (The English Patient)

1979, Governor General’s Award for Poetry (There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do)

1970, Governor General’s Award for Poetry (The Collected Works of Billy the Kid)

From the publisher: “Breathtakingly evoked and with unforgettable characters, Divisadero is a multi-layered novel about passion, loss, and the unshakeable past, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. It is Michael Ondaatje’s most intimate and beautiful novel to date.”

From reviews: “Truths amply demonstrated by character, imagery, and action are repeatedly double-underlined for the reader with ponderous generalizations such as ‘There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known only briefly.’” — Quill & Quire

“The work is written like a well-prepared meal, with the perfect amounts of appetizer and main course and dessert; just enough and not too much.” — January Magazine

“The more you reread Divisadero, the more you come to understand the sleight of hand that Ondaatje performs here. The sleuthing, for the novel is a detective story of the heart. The craft, for the author blends sex, drugs, and gambling with homesteading, caravans, and war. Every story it tells is really one story; every account of loyalty and betrayal, of people divided, is one account.” — Georgia Straight

“There is something endearingly human about this book, for all its art: who can’t forgive a hopeless romantic?” — New York Times

Representative passage: “There were nights when Lucien startled himself awake at his daughter’s wildness. How had she, the one daughter he had known as obedient and well mannered, evolved into such a person? Was it simply that Pierre was the man she demanded above every other principle? There was this live coal of desire on her tongue that had altered her, so that she could no longer be sheltered by the husk of a family. And he realized he loved even more this proud indelible daughter, his Flammarion companion, who had leapt beyond him into the life of this dangerous stranger, a man he was unable to like except through the knowledge that Lucette had placed herself in the cup of his hand, just as she had bent over and moved back into his body, defenceless with pleasure in the garden shower.”

My assessment: Divisadero is really two separate books, written in two divergent styles.

The first book is about a ranch hand, Coop, who has an affair with Anna, one of the daughters of the farmer for whom he works. When the father discovers the affair, he beats Coop almost to death. The story follows Coop’s adventures as a cardsharp in Vegas and Tahoe, where he becomes a “mechanic” — a cheat who is proficient at dealing stacked cards in such a way as to avoid notice.

The second book focuses on Anna, who flees the farm after the incident with her father and winds up in France, researching the life of a writer named Lucien Segura.

With a title like Divisadero, it is not surprising that the novel features diverging storylines. “Divisadero,” Anna says, “from the Spanish word for ‘division,’ … Or it might derive from the word divisar, meaning ‘to gaze at something from a distance.’” And lest we feel that the two halves of the novel are unconnected, Ondaatje provides numerous parallels between the two stories: both feature rural settings; both involve makeshift families; both feature an illicit love affair that a father discovers; both feature acts of violence in which shards of glass play a key role; and both are touched by war.

The problem is not the substance of these two narratives, the problem is their wildly divergent styles. The first half of the book is tough, direct, and often violent, propelled forward by strong storytelling and a seething undercurrent of menace.

When the focus shifts to Anna and her musings about the French writer, Ondaatje capitulates to the kind of flowery, mannered, purple prose that characterized The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost, and the book comes to a complete standstill. In place of the lean, crisp prose of the first half, this part of the book showcases the Ondaatje who never encountered a metaphor he didn’t fall instantly in love with: a purloined wooden flower retained by the thief is “a stolen thing like a live alouette in his pocket,” and a sexual liaison is described as moving “the heat of her cave onto his coldness.”

This is the kind of writing that has won Ondaatje accolades, but it generally comes off feeling overwrought and cloying. Following immediately upon the much more satisfying, less show-offy first half, it has the net effect of rendering Divisadero one of the most frustrating and disheartening reading experiences of the year.

Next: Late Nights on Air.

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