Strands May Be Delicate, but They’re All Connected

In Michael Ondaatje’s “Divisadero” an illuminating exchange takes place between Lucien Segura, who will go on to become a famously mysterious French writer, and Marie-Neige, the young bride of a brutal older man. Lucien and Marie-Neige have been “like two flammable matches side by side in a tinderbox.” But their attraction, like many of the undercurrents in this turbulent, wandering novel, is one of many strong passions that can only indirectly be expressed.

Lucien has just been partially blinded by glass shards. Glass shards are among the recurring motifs here, and blindness exists among Mr. Ondaatje’s characters in many metaphorical forms. And so, since he and Marie-Neige love the same Dumas stories and happen to be living in Gascony, the homeland of Dumas’s D’Artagnan, she begins reading “The Three Musketeers” to Lucien aloud. When he Marie-Neige a question about the book’s first chapter, she is confused: Should she go back and read it again? “No, just go on,” Lucien tells her. “Not knowing something essential makes you more involved.”

“Divisadero” is a dramatic illustration of how Mr. Ondaatje follows that same precept. It is a book that improves on second reading because it is so willfully elliptical at first. Among the essential things the reader cannot know, for instance, is what bearing the first half of the book has on the second, since they seem to be almost totally unrelated. Yet it turns out that there are many parallels, echoes, resonances, impulses, chirps (the book is ever-attentive to symbolic import of bird life) and creative curlicues that will present themselves to the patient admirer of Mr. Ondaatje’s work.

Speaking of patient: This author’s best books, of which “The English Patient” is the most prominent, all rely on such methods to a certain degree. Mr. Ondaatje does not write in mundanely linear ways, nor does he see events as isolated instances. There are always webs of memory, slips of time and divisions in experience to break the spell of an ordinary world. But “Divisadero,” with a title that denotes distance, division and a street in San Francisco, is a more stubbornly eclectic Ondaatje book than most.

In what follows, numbers indicate elements of the book that will repeat themselves. The novel begins in California, in a rural paradise (1), among family members whose relations are more acts of will than accidents of birth (2). (Numbered elements of the book are those that will repeat themselves.) Claire and Anna were born at the same hospital and have been raised as twins, although they had different mothers. Their father is a tough, overbearing man (3), which is made monstrously clear after Anna develops a passionate, unstoppable attraction (4) to Coop, the family’s young hired man. Coop has also been made part of this family, but that counts for nothing when the girls’ father catches him with Anna. A violent attack involving a shard of glass (5) destroys this family’s life forever.

This explosion, Anna thinks later, was “in retrospect something very small, something that might occur within just a square inch or two of a Breughel, but it set fire to the rest of my life.” It made Anna leave the farm and permanently lose touch with Coop and Claire. Claire spends much of her time on horseback (6), while Coop goes to Nevada and creates a whole new life as a gambler. “Divisadero” has a highly literary sensibility (7), to the point where Coop is tricked into slipping up at a card game by talk of Tolstoy.

Distant war (8) ominously colors the periphery of the story. Coop’s gambling career is at its peak when the first gulf war begins, although it barely registers in the casinos of Nevada. “For the three thousand gamblers inhaling piped-in oxygen at the Horseshoe, the war is already a video game, taking place on a fictional planet,” Mr. Ondaatje writes. Wars from medieval times to World War II rumble ominously from the fringes of the narrative.

Coop’s dealings with cards and women eventually destroy him, but not before he has re-encountered Claire, stirred her old memories and deeply hurt her by confusing her with Anna. All of this has been intercut with other facets of the story, to the point where it might be expected to continue. But then it disappears. And we are with Anna in France, where she finds meaning in her own life by plumbing the history of Lucien, now a famous dead literary figure. If this is arguably the most noxious conceit overworked in today’s fiction, trust Mr. Ondaatje at least to express it exquisitely. Taking up residence in Lucien’s house, Anna tells herself: “The manoir had once been the writer’s home, and she found herself in some modest contrapuntal dance with him.” Modest? Hardly. It is contrapuntal in the extreme.

Since Mr. Ondaatje writes with such grace, he brings a haunting, sensual delicacy to this latter part of “Divisadero.” Events between Anna and Raphael, who is more or less Lucien’s adopted son and has a fine, rustic way of keeping fragrant herbs in his pocket in case a loaf of bread comes along, wind up highly attuned to what happened between Lucien and Marie-Neige in the same setting. The water tower (9) that Coop once repaired morphs into a belfry repaired by Marie-Neige’s husband. The Sanskrit concept of gotraskhalana which has to do with calling a loved one by the wrong name, is everywhere within these goings on, and those who are not linked to the lives of others are linked to many different versions of themselves. Anna looks at birds (10) and knows that her secretive nature has created a flock of Annas within herself.

A more accurate synopsis of “Divisadero” would include the many loose ends and secondary developments that create an initial opacity. This underbrush is so dense that it takes work to cut through it and Mr. Ondaatje’s overview. But he is a writer of intense acuity. His eminence is well earned. This book is initially difficult, but the more you give “Divisadero,” the more it gives in return.

source : www.nytimes.com