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A review by likecymbeline
Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
4.0
When I was in high school my English teacher loved Ondaatje, as did his favourite student, forming a book club of two that I observed and envied. It lent this title an air of enchantment when it was released in the spring I was in Grade 12, reading only old classics when I was well enough to read anything at all. I can't tell you my mentality towards it at the time, only that I ascribed to it a Significance yet Remoteness as something I could not approach. I wouldn't have wanted to read something just to attempt to impress my teacher and intelligent classmate. I knew of Ondaatje's contemporary literary merit and read (and quoted) some of his poetry. Yet I would not reach out for it and instead cultivated this strange fetishization of Divisadero as a book one day worth reading. It is, perhaps, simply the first time I was aware of a book publishing announcement as a "major literary event" and built up my mythologies around that.
Which is all to say, I brought a lot of baggage to this book. Made worse by the fact that I borrowed it in 2020, read the first 90 pages, then with the pandemic left off reading for a while. I kept meaning to finish, but literal years passed so I started over from the beginning. I love the opening section (not just for having read it twice, but that did mean I expected more appearances of our opening characters before we reached the end). The writing is beautiful, the characters are tenderly portrayed, with Ondaatje's natural and particular physicality: he dwells sensuously on the common body, the practical body - the characters live in their bodies. I also loved the mysterious duality (which could've gone wrong - the ability, twice!, to swap out one sister for another. But it's more complicated than that, because of the interiority Anna and Claire have), what it means to be divided, to be twinned or untwinned. While I didn't expect us to end on Lucien, it was another mesmerizing story to be told. Further, I read it while coming down with something, with a feverish and sometimes confused feeling in my own surroundings so that sometimes events of the book felt like memories from books long past because the novel is so much fuller than what it depicts and contains. Lost in my own elliptical reading, untethered from my past and that time of youth and what could've been instead if I had read it then (can a book make such a difference in a life, in how it turns out? One must ask). Or if it makes any difference at all. I was ready for the lessons it offered, this time, or so I like to think, but don't trust my own judgment.
Which is all to say, I brought a lot of baggage to this book. Made worse by the fact that I borrowed it in 2020, read the first 90 pages, then with the pandemic left off reading for a while. I kept meaning to finish, but literal years passed so I started over from the beginning. I love the opening section (not just for having read it twice, but that did mean I expected more appearances of our opening characters before we reached the end). The writing is beautiful, the characters are tenderly portrayed, with Ondaatje's natural and particular physicality: he dwells sensuously on the common body, the practical body - the characters live in their bodies. I also loved the mysterious duality (which could've gone wrong - the ability, twice!, to swap out one sister for another. But it's more complicated than that, because of the interiority Anna and Claire have), what it means to be divided, to be twinned or untwinned. While I didn't expect us to end on Lucien, it was another mesmerizing story to be told. Further, I read it while coming down with something, with a feverish and sometimes confused feeling in my own surroundings so that sometimes events of the book felt like memories from books long past because the novel is so much fuller than what it depicts and contains. Lost in my own elliptical reading, untethered from my past and that time of youth and what could've been instead if I had read it then (can a book make such a difference in a life, in how it turns out? One must ask). Or if it makes any difference at all. I was ready for the lessons it offered, this time, or so I like to think, but don't trust my own judgment.