Volume 54, Number 11 · June 28, 2007
'A New Kind of Mongrel Fiction'
By Pico Iyer
Divisadero
by Michael Ondaatje
Knopf, 273 pp., $25.00
Michael Ondaatje's novels are all about putting pieces together. Quite literally, because they proceed through a series of carefully shaped vignettes that the reader has to fit into a pattern; but more deeply, too, because their structure invariably reflects their theme. Nearly always they are about attempting to tie things together, to heal a fracture—between one side of Toronto and another in his first major novel, In the Skin of a Lion; between (and within) four wounded travelers in an abandoned convent in The English Patient; between a visiting forensic anthropologist and two divided brothers amid the debris of Sri Lanka's ongoing civil war in Anil's Ghost. How to turn the fragments into a living whole, if only for a moment, is the burden of these elaborate, questing narratives.
Review, 4352 words
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