divisadero book review and summary

• Member Login
• Library Patron Login
• Get a Free Issue of our Ezine! Claim

Book Summary and Reviews of Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

Summary | Reviews | More Information | More Books

by Michael Ondaatje

• Critics' Consensus:
• Genre: Literary Fiction
• Publication Information
• Write a Review
• Buy This Book

About this book

Book summary.

In the 1970s in northern California, near Gold Rush country, a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it is riven by an incident of violence — of both hand and heart — that sets fire to the rest of their lives. Divisadero takes us from the city of San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada’s casinos, and eventually to the landscape of south central France. It is here, outside a small rural village, that Anna becomes immersed in the life and the world of a writer from an earlier time — Lucien Segura. His compelling story, which has its beginnings at the turn of the century, circles around "the raw truth" of Anna's own life, the one she's left behind but can never truly leave. And as the narrative moves back and forth in time and place, we discover each of the characters managing to find some foothold in a present rough-hewn from the past.

• "Beyond the Book" articles
• Free books to read and review (US only)
• Find books by time period, setting & theme
• Read-alike suggestions by book and author
• Book club discussions
• and much more!
• Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
• More about membership!

Media Reviews

Reader reviews.

"Ondaatje's first fiction in six years lacks the gut punch of Anil's Ghost and The English Patient , but delivers his trademark seductive prose, quixotic characters and psychological intricacy." - PW. "Starred Review. The new novel by the author of The English Patient (1992) is easy to read, not because its theme and plot are simple but because the reader simply wants to read it." - Booklist. "Not to be missed . . . Intricate, lyrical, profoundly moving, this brilliantly imagined meditation on love, loss and memory unforgettably dramatizes the rueful realization that '[t]here is the hidden presence of others in us . . . . [and] We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.'" - Kirkus. "“A heart-wrenching story about a tight-knit family that’s shattered forever by one pivotal event . . . Divisadero has been called Ondaatje’s most accessible novel, perhaps because it's about the universal subject of family . . . Ondaatje’s writing is evocative, powerful and deeply intimate. The reader can't help but care about all of the characters." - Calgary Herald. " Divisadero shines with an indisputable and incomparable power . . . [It] is so rich that every description or summary beggars its accomplishment . . . Savouring Ondaatje’s subtle expertise in word cuisine is an indelible pleasure, pleasure that, incredibly, deepens with each book penned by this genius (there is no other word for a writer of such grace and depth) . . . Although the attentive reader will delight in every sentence, will revel in the vividly original language and narrative approach, Divisadero refuses the aggrandizement of pyrotechnics. By virtue of that reserve, the novel accomplishes an intimacy that is extraordinary, nakedly beautiful." - Globe and Mail (Toronto).

Click here and be the first to review this book!

Author Information

• Books by this Author

Michael Ondaatje Author Biography

Photo © Adam Elder/Pacha/Corbis

Michael Ondaatje is the author of six previous novels, a memoir, a nonfiction book on film, and several books of poetry.  The English Patient  won the Booker Prize;  Anil's Ghost  won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Prix Médicis. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje now lives in Toronto.

Author Interview

Name Pronunciation Michael Ondaatje: on-DARt-she (the t is not silent but is barely heard and rolls into the final syllable)

Other books by Michael Ondaatje at BookBrowse

More Recommendations

Readers also browsed . . ..

• The Sisters K by Maureen Sun
• Blood Test by Charles Baxter
• Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
• Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner
• Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe
• Playground by Richard Powers
• My Friends by Hisham Matar
• Rental House by Weike Wang
• Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst
• Before the Mango Ripens by Afabwaje Kurian

more literary fiction...

Members Recommend

Pony Confidential by Christina Lynch

In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

Who Said...

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Solve this clue:

and be entered to win..

Your guide to exceptional           books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info and giveaways by email.

Michael Ondaatje

273 pages, Hardcover

First published January 29, 2007

About the author

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think? Rate this book Write a Review

Friends & Following

Community reviews.

All of the world there must be people like us, Anna had said then, wounded in some way by falling in love - seemingly the most natural of acts.

He told her there was a song he no longer performed that had to do with all of that. It was about a woman who had risen from their bed in the middle of the night and left him. He would hear evidence of her in villages in the north, bust she would be gone by the time the rumour of her presence reached him. A song of endless searching, sung by this man who until then had seldom revealed himself. His tough fingers would tug the heart out of his guitar. He'd sing this song to those who had grown up with his music over the years, who were familiar with his skill at avoiding the limelight. He knew his reputation for shyness and guile, but now he conceded his scarred self to his friends. ' If any of you on your journeys see her - shout to me, whistle ...' he sang, and it became a habit for audiences to shout and whistle in response to those lines. There was nowhere for him to hide in such a song that had all of its doors and windows open, so that he could walk out of it artlessly, the antiphonal responses blending with him as though he were no longer on the stage.

Join the discussion

Can't find what you're looking for.

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007

Plot Summary

We’re just getting started

Add this title to our list of requested Study Guides!

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Book Review: Divisadero

By Janet Maslin

• June 14, 2007

By Michael Ondaatje

273 pages. $25. Knopf.

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 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. When he asks 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 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 that will present themselves to the patient admirer of Ondaatje's work.

Ondaatje does not write in mundanely linear ways, nor does he see events as isolated instances. 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). 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, 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 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 dealings with cards and women eventually destroy him, but not before he has re-encountered Claire 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 life by plumbing the history of Lucien, now a famous dead literary figure.

Since Ondaatje writes with such grace, he brings a haunting, sensual delicacy to this latter part of "Divisadero." 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. But Ondaatje 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.

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

by Michael Ondaatje ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 4, 2007

Not to be missed.

Poetic intensity trumps structural irregularity and storytelling opacity in the celebrated Ontario author’s intense fifth novel ( Anil’s Ghost , 2000, etc.).

Its several stories unfold within two distinct clusters of narratives. The first begins in California in the 1970s, when Anna and her half-sister Claire (a “foundling”) are separated after their father discovers teenaged Anna in the embrace of their hired hand Coop (another orphan). He beats the younger man nearly to death and is himself attacked by his half-crazed daughter. Thereafter, the story is distributed among Coop’s education as a poker player and misadventures among his criminal associates; Claire’s attempt to rebuild her life as a public defender’s legal researcher (which leads her to a brief chance reunion with Coop); and Anna’s pursuit of an academic career as a specialist in French literature, which takes her to the French countryside and the home of late author Lucien Segura—whose life, as reconstructed from her research, is most cunningly connected, incident by incident, image by image, to the story of Anna’s destroyed family. Echoes of Ondaatje’s Booker Prize winner The English Patient (1992) resound throughout Lucien’s story, in which a withdrawn, dreamy boy is shaken into life when a gypsy pair—volatile Roman and his teenaged bride Marie-Neige—are given land to farm in exchange for work performed for Lucien’s stoical single mother Odile. The illiterate Marie-Neige becomes Lucien’s soul mate, eventual intellectual companion and the love of his life—until war takes him away from their quiet village, returning him home only when it is too late to reclaim the unlived life that will endure only in the books he writes. Intricate, lyrical, profoundly moving, this brilliantly imagined meditation on love, loss and memory unforgettably dramatizes the rueful realization that “[t]here is the hidden presence of others in us…[and] We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.”

Pub Date: June 4, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-307-26635-4

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007

GENERAL FICTION

Share your opinion of this book

More by Michael Ondaatje

BOOK REVIEW

by Michael Ondaatje

THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Life lessons.

Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.

Pub Date: July 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-345-46750-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004

More by Kristin Hannah

by Kristin Hannah

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2015

Kirkus Prize winner

National Book Award Finalist

A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

More by Hanya Yanagihara

by Hanya Yanagihara

More About This Book

PERSPECTIVES

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC.   All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

• ROBERT McGILL

Review of Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero

Originally published in Literary Review of Canada 15.6 .

Don’t Try This at Home

A puzzle of a novel gets away with taking risks.

Divisadero . Michael Ondaatje. McClelland & Stewart. 273 pages. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0-7710-6872-0.

Michael Ondaatje’s novels should come with a warning label on them, something to the effect that what you’re about to read has been executed by a professional and should not be tried at home. This warning should apply not least to readers, who otherwise might be tempted by the example of Ondaatje’s characters to pursue things like defusing bombs, catching nuns in mid-air, and having spectacular sex in semi-public locations. The warning should also be heeded by novelists who aspire to the kinds of feats that Ondaatje accomplishes so deftly and so often. Like his characters, he does hazardous work. His sensuous, poetic descriptions of extraordinary people are constantly at risk of collapsing into romantic cliché. In his new novel Divisadero , for instance, there’s a character named Raphael who’s a modern-day troubadour; his mother’s a Tarot card-reading Gypsy named Aria. Another writer would not get away with this. It’s a mark of Ondaatje’s talent and commitment to his story that he does.

The story in question begins in the 1970s with Anna and Claire, teenage girls on a farm in California who have grown up sharing a father after their mothers died in childbirth. Living with them is a young farm-hand, Coop, who becomes Anna’s secret lover. When the father discovers Coop and Anna in flagrante delicto one stormy night, he beats Coop nearly to death, causing the lovers to flee the farm and take up separate lives. Divisadero goes on to follow these characters in adulthood: Coop turns into a Reno card-sharp and Claire becomes a Public Defender’s Office investigator, while Anna moves to France and takes Raphael as a lover.

But halfway into the book, just as Coop and Claire have crossed paths thirty years later and are on the cusp of an impromptu reunion with her father, the novel abandons them for good. Then the narrative jumps back a hundred years to tell the story of an early twentieth-century writer named Lucien Segura whom Anna is researching. Divisadero chronicles his life as he moves from childhood to old age, all the while nursing a desire for his married neighbour Marie-Neige. Although readers might expect this story to loop back to the contemporary one, Ondaatje refuses to provide such a tidy resolution, and other than some brief reflections by the narrator on the present-day characters, Divisadero concludes while still immersed in Segura’s life.

Shifts in time and place are hardly unusual in Ondaatje’s novels, but the juxtaposition of such different stories marks out Divisadero as something new. So too does the focus on more or less ordinary lives. It’s true that Ondaatje’s trademark descriptions of remarkable physical exploits aren’t lacking here: for instance, a man’s balancing act as he renovates a belfry recalls Temelcoff’s daredevil construction manoeuvres in In the Skin of a Lion . However, in Divisadero such moments seem relatively unmoored from their historical contexts when compared to Ondaatje’s previous three novels. Even taking into account the evocations of World War One and the two Gulf Wars during Segura’s and Coop’s stories, respectively, Ondaatje isn’t nearly as concerned here with history as he was when he wrote about the building of modern Toronto in In the Skin of a Lion , World War Two in The English Patient , or the ongoing Sri Lankan conflict in Anil’s Ghost . Instead, he seems to have moved in the direction of Alice Munro, toward lives that occur outside the spotlight of nation- or world-defining events.

Readers trying to grasp the significance of the lives depicted in Divisadero receive assistance from Anna, who at several points comments on storytelling and psychology. Her ideas serve as an implicit justification of the fragmentary structure that Ondaatje has chosen. For example, she claims: “We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell” (136). And in case we haven’t got the point, she asserts a few pages later: “sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us” (142). These statements are in peril of instructing us a bit too baldly about how to read Divisadero , but they do make it clear that we should identify Anna as the unnamed narrator of the novel’s other stories. They also insist that we pay attention to the ways in which Segura’s life echoes hers.

Accordingly, when Segura spies his daughter having illicit sex with a young man, we know that Anna’s choice to relate this moment is bound up with her own traumatic past. The entire narrative architecture of Divisadero emerges as a vehicle for her to gain a new perspective on herself. Her need for such a detached point of view also helps in explaining the book’s title. As she points out during a meditation—perhaps too contrived—on the word “divisadero,” it’s not only the name of the San Francisco street where she once lived, but a term that “might derive from the word divisar , meaning ‘to gaze at something from a distance’” (142). And as Anna strives for such perspective by telling the stories that constitute Divisadero , we can sense Ondaatje making an argument for fiction’s importance to readers, as well, in gaining a new apprehension of their lives.

Indeed, for all its psychological and narrative intricacies, the most striking aspect of Divisadero may be its tender encomium to literature. The novel’s portrait of Segura as a young man includes many passages that convey the seductiveness of books, not least as he and Marie-Neige build an intimacy by reading novels to each other. Divisadero pays homage to French literature in particular with self-conscious nods to writers such as Dumas, Hugo, Colette, and Balzac. No other novel by Ondaatje has so ebulliently embraced the notion that books are made out of other books.

In that regard, Divisadero stands as a monument to the joys of storytelling and reading, one that is augmented rather than undermined by its structural complexity, psychological ambiguities, and resolute literariness. These aspects of the novel present a challenge to readers, but a rewarding and even playful one. When a chapter entitled “The Red and the Black” is followed by a scene where Claire walks into a Tahoe club called “the Stendhal,” you have to laugh at Ondaatje’s audacity in name-checking so flagrantly. He’s taking a risk and doing it with panache.

The fragmented form of Divisadero is similarly a courageous move. A less ambitious writer might have played it safe and either connected the narrative strands more neatly or published them as separate novellas. In choosing instead to take a chance with Divisadero ’s collage structure, Ondaatje dares us to join him in his gambit and spend time puzzling out how things fit together. It seems not much to ask. After all, among the greatest delights of reading a new Ondaatje novel are the held-breath anticipation as one waits to see whether he might finally falter, and the dizzying pleasure of discovering at the end that he has not.

ROBERT McGILL © 2024

• UK Politics
• News Videos
• Paris 2024 Olympics
• Rugby Union
• Sport Videos
• John Rentoul
• Mary Dejevsky
• Andrew Grice
• Sean O’Grady
• Photography
• Theatre & Dance
• Culture Videos
• Fitness & Wellbeing
• Food & Drink
• Health & Families
• Royal Family
• Electric Vehicles
• Car Insurance Deals
• Lifestyle Videos
• Home & Garden
• Broadband deals
• Fashion & Beauty
• Travel & Outdoors
• Sports & Fitness
• Hotel Reviews
• News & Advice
• Simon Calder
• Australia & New Zealand
• South America
• C. America & Caribbean
• Middle East
• Politics Explained
• News Analysis
• Today’s Edition
• Climate 100
• Sustainable Living
• Climate Videos
• Solar Panels
• Behind The Headlines
• On The Ground
• Decomplicated
• You Ask The Questions
• Binge Watch
• Travel Smart
• Watch on your TV
• Crosswords & Puzzles
• Most Commented
• Newsletters
• Ask Me Anything
• Virtual Events
• Wine Offers
• Betting Sites
• Casino Sites

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in Please refresh your browser to be logged in

Divisadero, By Michael Ondaatje

In his tale of a lovelorn gambler, michael ondaatje daringly reveals his own hand, subscribe to independent premium to bookmark this article.

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.

Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews

Sign up to our free indyarts newsletter.

Whereas The English Patient's Count Almasy carried his battered copy of Herodotus and his horrific injuries, the scars of Divisadero's characters are for the most part invisible but no less extreme. Michael Ondaatje writes in a note that the whole sweep of his layered novel of private histories came from one line of a song: "If any of you on your journeys see her – shout to me, whistle..."

Opening in California in the 1970s, with a violently destroyed love affair, the novel travels both back to wartime France, and forward to the lovers', Anna and Coup's, ruptured present. Throughout we see that long, hopeless backward glance. He becomes a gambler, she an archivist – entirely lost to each other yet remaining "possibilities" any time a phone rings. Ondaatje's novels often contain extraordinary artisans who stand in for artists – Almasy, the map maker, the thief Caravaggio (who briefly re-appears here), the bomb diffuser, Kip, the DNA scientist of Anil's Ghost or the acrobatic builders of Toronto of In the Skin of a Lion. In place of such self-conscious shadows, Divisadero offers us not one writer but two: Anna, and her latest subject, a French poet, Lucien Segura.

The sensual and meditative are resonantly tangled up, as so often in Ondaatje's work, taking on a particular force in a novel that argues so passionately for fiction as a means of survival. "So we fall in love with ghosts," he writes of the partial version of herself that Anna shares with her lovers; the lyricism offers a premonition of exactly what will happen – quite literally – in the novel's final elegiac section. Segura's own life – his own shadow over the marriage of a young girl – is swiftly told in the novel's last 100 pages, with an almost distracting potency. As "researched" by Anna, this story is rich with echoes of the French novelists of Segura's childhood, offering a similarly fantastical world of gentle thieves, tiny chances, disguise, misplaced desire and wish fulfilment, in which the dead live and the lost are found or almost re-found. Segura notes of his lover: "She had, like one of those partially villainous and always evolving heroines," as deftly as a card, "turned his heart over on the wrong day."

The novel's mysterious title comes from the name of a street in San Francisco (one of fragmented and restless Anna's many temporary homes) and means both a separation and a distant gaze. The word seems to conjure an escape, yet simultaneously that long look, almost a quest. Coup, after losing Anna, self-protectively, chooses only women he feels he won't love. It's a tactic that falters only once, when he first sees his girlfriend, a singer, on stage. He might be the gambler, but in Divisadero it's Ondaatje who so daringly reveals his own hand. Watching her, transfigured, so too is Coup: "There was nothing," he thinks, "too prepared or controlled about the performance. She was enlarged." It's hard to think of a more apt description for Ondaatje's powerfully affecting consideration of the writer's lonely spotlight, or for the great humanity he locates in men and women's hopeful addiction to "enchantment" – as much in each others' arms as in the pages of novels.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies