Novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje offered little insight into his literary project last night. After reading for nearly an hour from his latest novel, he retired from the stage of Salomon 101. He returned with seeming reluctance to answer a single question before stepping down again.
The writer spoke and signed copies of his book in the Salomon Center in the last event of the Literary Arts Program's "Writers on Writing" series.
Ondaatje's novel "The English Patient," a fragmented romance set in World War II-era Europe and North Africa, has been his greatest success to date, winning a Booker Prize. In film adaptation, it garnered nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture in 1996. His next novel, "Anil's Ghost," the account of a woman's return to Ondaatje's native Sri Lanka to investigate war crimes, met with less commercial success but earned him the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize and the Prix Medicis.
After a brief introduction by Brian Evanson, director of Literary Arts, who called Ondaatje's latest book "perhaps his boldest and most ambitious novel yet," Ondaatje took the podium. In his distinct, inscrutable accent - it has traces of Sri Lanka, England and Canada in it - he read several long passages from "Divisadero," tracing the story of Anna, one of the novel's several protagonists and its closest approximation of an authorial mouthpiece.
"Divisadero" is a novel of kaleidoscopic complexity. It opens with the account of peaceful family life on a North California farm - a widower living with two daughters and a young farmhand named Coop - but both the story and the family soon violently explode. The novel's single plotline breaks up into at least four, and by its second half the focus has moved from the contemporary West Coast to turn-of-the-century southern France.
Ondaatje has called his work a Cubist novel - he makes heavy use of the jumbled and fragmented narration that characterized "The English Patient." Between selections, he explained that the novel's name, drawn from Divisadero Street in San Francisco, gestures towards its intent. "Divisadero," he said, has a double etymology. It is derived both from the Spanish word for division and from "divisar," to look at from a distance.
Ondaatje's intent, it seems, was to smash a story to pieces and then indicate connections between the shards. This is an ambitious blueprint for the brave new novel, a novel that functions like jazz music or poetry. But despite the accolades "Divisadero" has received, it seems to fall short of the standard he set in previous work.
Ondaatje's prose is often awkward, and though he told The Herald that "Divisadero" might be his "most personal" work, its tone feels a bit contrived. It lacks the astonishing lucidity that carried "The English Patient" to success.
But at the reading, Ondaatje's deep, strangely melodic intonation alchemized his lacking prose. Even his most stilted sentences became streams of liquid vowels and crisp consonants, mesmerizing and occult. The words' meaning yielded to their sound, and that sound gave at least this reviewer hope that the limpid and poetic prose of "The English Patient" might make a comeback in Ondaatje's future work.
