"Divisadero" by Michael Ondaatje
Hal Wake recently introduced Ondaatje at a reading and asked him what the book meant since he had been writing it for five years. Ondaatje replied it would take a couple of years before he knew what it meant. I hope he tells his readers when he figures it out.
Even though Aritha Van Herk gave it a long laudatory review in the Globe and Mail, I really don't think it adds up to a novel. I do agree that the writing is quite wonderful as usual. I would say it is half a novel and a novella loosely and rather artificially connected. Is this unity or even honest to connect two completely different stories by having a main character in the first doing research on the writer who is a main character in the second part and then launching into a completely different story? He does have the researcher have an affair with someone who knew the writer whose story is being told but really....how contrived.
I think rather than creating a new literary form, the lowdown is that his publisher told him to present what he had been fiddling with in the last five years and this is it. Or maybe, like Ondaatje, it will take me a couple of years to figure out what it means.
It seems Van Herk is brought out to give these positive reviews to literary icons whose current work is questionable. I could be wrong...I've only read a few of her reviews but haven't liked them. She had such promise with her first (and really only success) novel called "Tentpeg"...worth a read if you haven't read it. She won $50,000 for that in the first novel prize and spent it on a Porche with a vanity licence plate "First Novel". I thought it was a confident gesture at the time and was amused by it. No thinking she better live on that money until she had another success.
