Divisadero takes its name from the San Francisco thoroughfare where its protagonist, Anna, claims her home. Ondaatje riffs on the meaning of Divisadero, to divide,and the distance it implies is echoed in the fragmentation of his narrative and the distance between its central characters.
Home Life: California, 1970's
The three main characters in Divisadero are siblings, of a sort. When Anna's mother dies in childbirth, Anna's father adopts an orphan child, Claire, and raises her as his own. The girls' other sibling, Coop, comes to live and work on the family's farm in Petaluma when his parents are brutally murdered. The girls see themselves as twins of a sort, until Anna's sexual awakening with Coop leads to a desperate family tragedy that fragments their world forever. Anna disappears, and it is unclear from Ondaatje's narration whether she ever sees Coop or Claire again.
Contemporary West: San Francisco and Tahoe, 1990's
Claire, somewhat the forgotten child, lives in San Francisco and works as an attorney's aide in San Francisco. Though her present life is dutifully described, Claire's character comes to life when she is on horseback. Claire maintains an awkward relationship with her father, who disappears into himself after Anna's departure.
In a convenient stroke of luck, Claire and Coop are reunited through a chance meeting in a Tahoe diner. The reader lears that Coop has made a living as a cardsharp, and his life may be in danger. Coop's character seems to have evolved the least; he is still very much stuck from the emotional trauma he suffered in his youth. When Coop is brutally beaten and left for dead, Claire finds him and becomes his caretaker. Coop's memory erased, he believes Claire is her sister Anna.
France, past and present:
Anna, a professor (though it is unclear whether she teaches literature, history, or art) on sabbatical in the French countryside to study the works of writer Lucien Segura, falls in love with a local half-Roma musician, Rafael. The bulk of the novel chronicles Anna's intimacy with Rafael, and Rafael's acquaintaince with Lucien Segura. In the book's final chapter, Ondaatje retreats into Segura's world, presenting a narrative of war-torn romances between Segura and his neighbor's wife.
Fragmented Narratives, Emotional Landscapes:
Ondaatje enjoys historical research, and it is clear, from his depiction of San Francisco and France. Indeed, whole passages seem transplanted from histories, as if the author were so taken with creating his landscapes that his characters became secondary. Since the stories of Coop, Claire and Anna are intertwined, Ondaatje splices those tales together. The reader feels the true impact of the family's emotional tragedy largely through these divisions.
Ondaatje details the effect Anna's absence has on the characters' lives; she is the thread that ties Claire to her father and to Coop, and though Anna herself refuses to speak of her family to others, she cannot escape her reflections of them. In a key moment of growth for her character, she decides to tell a lover about her past for the first time, however, this scene is not written. Ondaatje describes his writing process as guided by instinct. Like his process, the novel's journey is largely subterranean and intuitive. Ondaatje wants to chop away at truth, the characters' and our own universal truths, and while his prose is lovely and his characters fully round, Divisadero as a whole seems incomplete.
In the latter half of the book, Lucien Segura's life and writing, feels tangentially linked to the characters' drama. Thematically, Segura's tale adds another layer of loneliness and alienation. Anna's relationship with Rafael is foregrounded in her familial drama, and Rafael's relationship with Segura and with his own family is an echo of the book's central characters. Divisadero raises lots of questions about the human search for love and actualization, the present's preoccupation with the past, and the geography and cartography or romance. As a meditation on our emotional landscapes, Divisadero is haunting. As a novel, Ondaatje's threads do not quite come together at close. Too much of the necessary work of bringing these orphans together once more fails to happen on the page.
