Divisadaro by Michael Ondaatje

I loved Anil's Ghost, so I knew I would love Divisadaro. The tale begins in Northern California during the 1970's - a man loses his wife during the birth of their first child and ends up raising three children. How? A woman dies during labour the same day as his wife and he offers to takes this baby as well. He has also taken in Coop, sole survival of the brutal slaying of his family on a neighbouring plot. Claire, Anna and Coop are intimate with loss, and on the cusp of passion and adulthood when a tragic accident and a forbidden love splinter the family. The story finds Claire in San Francisco, Coop gambling in Nevada and Anna writing in France, and yet there is an unbreakable bond between them. Poetic, atmospheric and full of the dark and the light this is a beautiful book. Peopled with characters who know hardship, ruin, self-destruction, beauty, and how to find one's own unique way in the world.

"I came to France, in the 34th year of my life, to research the life and works of Lucien Segura. I had flown to Orly, my friend Branka had met my plane, and we drove through the darkening outskirts, passing the smaller peripheral towns that were like blinks of light as we travelled south. We had not seen each other in over a year, and now we were catching up, talking all the way. Branka had packed a hamper of fruit, bread, and cheese, and we ate most of it, and drank from a constantly refilled glass of red wine that we shared."

- sounds nice, but what, they were drinking and driving? ah, fiction.

"There was now not a single lite streetlamp in the villages we passed, just our headlights veering and sweeping along the two-lane roads. We were alone in the world, in nameless and unseen country. I love such journeying at night. You have most of your life strapped to your back. Music on the radio comes faint and intermittent. You are wordless at last. Your friend's hand on your knee to make sure you are not drifting away. The black hedges coax you on."

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