Last night I dreamed of apocalypse: the room filled with water for a couple of hours, and we were all submerged, floundering around in scuba suits and waiting for the world to return. The details of the nascent civilization that began to assemble when the water drained remain blurry, but I remember a feeling of emptiness, of not being able to find the furniture, of everyone’s faces shifting like paintings in the rain.
The start of Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero embraces similar apocalyptic tension. The novel begins with Anna and Claire, surrogate sisters growing up on a small farm in Northern California along with their stoic father and a farmhand named Coop with a penchant for chasing gold. Their peaceful existence disintegrates when a fiery incident disbands the family, and we spend the rest of the novel trying to trace these initial characters as they disappear into the tapestry of Ondaatje’s intricate storytelling. From Reno to Tahoe to France, Divisadero refuses to sit still, launching us abruptly from one time period to the next and into separate settings that seem discordant.
In this way, the structure of the book is relentlessly unsettling. We are constantly forced to start over. In rural France, we meet Rafael the pickpocket who pulls sprigs of rosemary from his shirt pockets, and then the novel jumps to Reno where Coop is having a love affair with Bridget the shifty drug-addict. Ondaatje begins one storyline, fleshes it out with enough lush and poetic language to leave us floored, and then seemingly abandons it. But Ondaatje is a very methodical writer, and his layering requires careful contemplation. I loved this book because the details of one story haunt the next one, creating a palimpsest of love stories and lost opportunities.
This is the last book for which my world stopped. I remember falling so deeply into the writing that my life outside the book became subordinate to Divisadero’s universe. Despite all of the divisions and displacements, the novel somehow convinced me of the interconnectedness of people, the osmosis of identities, and of the existence of parallel universes. As Ondaatje writes, Everything is collage, even genetics. There is a hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.
