Michael Ondaatje: Divisadero

[shaunrandol]

A recently published essay on The Mantle actually examines Divisadero and three other Ondaatje novels (In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient, and Anil's Ghost).

Enjoy...

The Art of Looking Back
In the contemporary literary imagination, few authors can claim to have the immediate emotive responses to their work as Canadian Michael Ondaatje. Influencing other contemporary Canadian poets-turned-writers such as Anne Simpson, Patrick Lane and Priscilla Uppal, Ondaatje is widely recognized for epic yet intimate storytelling, lyrical and poetic prose, and the ability to connect the geographies of the past and present. Mastering in dense, intimate narratives that interweave the reverberations of individual actions and stories amid the greater forces of communal history, his novels seek to answer questions that are as timeless as they are relevant in contemporary society: how can we move on from trauma without forgetting? How can each life and each story be sanctified, or be made whole once it has been smashed? What does it mean to be human, to love and to lose, and what can be gained out of loss?


While Ondaatje has published several novels, most notably In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient, Anil’s Ghost and his most recent work Divisadero, his central ideas have remained consistent and have been deepened and amplified in each successive work. A true poet at heart, his novels find their genesis in vivid, startling images that bleed and bloom into full-length narratives. The images of a nun falling off a half-completed bridge in In the Skin of a Lion; the burnt convalescent Almasy, his image and identity literally erased by flames in The English Patient; a Buddhist statue painstakingly reconstructed in Anil’s Ghost; and sisters caught in a barn with a frightened horse amid a violent thunderstorm in Divisadero are some of the central images associated with Ondaatje’s works. These visualizations are the cornerstone for Ondaatje’s trenchant, powerful explorations of the contradictions and duality of the human condition. Where earlier works such as The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and Coming Through Slaughter (1976) were dark, often disturbing retellings of the downward spiral of real historical lives, riveting and raw yet difficult to digest, the fictive work containing the origin of his main arguments is often regarded as In the Skin of a Lion.

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