Divisidero. I read this for my new book club, and I had very mixed feelings. On the one hand I think his writing is beautiful, and I liked the two stories fine. I think I understood what he was doing with the divided stories, but I was less certain that he’d pulled it off — in the end I just didn’t feel that they’d meshed very well.

I also had a lot of nitpicky complaints about the first half of the novel, which is set in a time and place with which I am pretty familiar. The ice storm in Petaluma felt wrong to me; I know it was supposed to be a “freak” storm, but seriously, he might as well have thrown in a rain of frogs. Claire was far too young to have had polio as a child. Nobody would stop for lunch in Carmichael. And I really wish there had been no mention of a California public defender’s office, or defense investigators, because the total unreality of those elements really took me out of the story.

Those little nitpicks made it hard for me to be fair to the novel as a whole. I found myself distrusting the part of the novel that is set in France, and feeling that it was overly romanticized and possibly anachronistic, when really I just wanted to let go and enjoy the damn book. I’m not sure how much of that was Ondaatje’s fault and how much was mine, but either way I was a bit disappointed.

I do want to read The English Patient now; the only Ondaatje I’ve read before this was a book of poetry and that short novella about the jazz musician.

So I took a break from this site, and then I went and had a baby, and in very short order I became very tired of board books and old women whispering “hush.” So I’m going to try this again, but with no attempt to keep track of every single thing I read. We’ll see what happens.

And comments are unbroken, for whatever that’s worth.