Divisadero

Library Journal Review: Both beautiful and baffling, Ondaatje's most recent novel (after 2000's Anil's Ghost) opens with the portrait of a complex family suddenly imploding in the Northern California wilderness. Anna and Claire have been raised as sisters by Anna's father (both mothers died in childbirth), with a neighbor boy named Coop also in attendance, his family having been battered to death by a hired hand. Anna and Claire both have feelings for Coop, but it's Anna who enters into an affair with him, precipitating an act of violence that flings the family apart. Subsequent passages detail Coop's desperate gambling, Anna's isolation in distant France, Coop and Claire's chance meeting years later, and the family history of poet Lucien Segura, whose works Anna has been studying. These passage are evocatively and delicately rendered, but their connections aren't; the book falls apart into lovely pieces that the reader has a hard time collecting. Oddly, this sense of dislocation does not seem to be the point, for a sense of family connection reverberates faintly throughout despite the disjointed narrative. Of course, dedicated readers will want to investigate, but others may be confounded. For literary collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/07.]?Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Copyright ? Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.