Divisardo

by: Michael Ondaatje

Published by: Vintage International

Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart

Michael Ondaatje’s Divisardo is the first novel I have read, or rather tried to read, by this critically-acclaimed author of The English Patient. I’m sorry to report that I was disappointed with this latest Ondaatje effort. So much so in fact that I didn’t even finish it—which is a rarity for me. Once I get halfway through a book, I feel obligated somehow to finish it. Not so here. I got to page 191 (total page count is 273) and couldn’t not go any farther. I thought maybe it was because I was eager to read Jay Asher’s debut novel, Thirteen Reasons Why. I came back to Divisardo after completing Thirteen, but it was too late; I was too bored with the undefined plot line to read the rest.

Divisardo is, supposedly, about three children who are raised together, Claire, Coop, and Anna. Anna and Coop had an affair, and he turned into a professional gambler. That’s as much as the non-linear structure as I could figure out. Well, Anna is studying French writer Lucien Segura. Other reviewers have mentioned the parallel of Anna and Claire with Segura’s daughters, but I didn’t even see a reference to them in the pages I read.

One of the biggest issues I had with the text was voice. All the characters sounded the same, and all were flat. Whether the scene was violent or sanguine, it became increasingly difficult to determine who was talking when because of the sameness in tone and voice. This is the one time that a varied sentence structure could have worked wonders for a piece.

The San Francisco Chronicle called Divisardo “Brilliant…plays whimsically with chronology and memory, with fantasy and historical fact.” Author Jhumpa Lahiri called the work “a mosiac of profound dignity, with an elegiac quietude that only the greatest of writers can achieve.” Me? I just went “huh?”

Armchair Interviews says: Heed this reviewer’s comments.