Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje

By the author of The English Patient (which I've never read nor seen), Divisadero is like two novels in one. In the first major story, Anna lives in Gold Rush country with her father, her adopted sister Claire, and her adopted brother Coop. After a violent incident occurs, Anna runs away and never sees her family again. Coop slinks off to become a gambler and Claire goes to work for the public defender in San Francisco. Eventually Coop and Claire serendipitously reunite, but Coop's memory has failed him and Claire is left to help him piece together his past. In the second part of the story, we find Anna in France, now a writer, researching the life of the famous author who once lived in her home. The life of the old writer becomes infused with the new -and we are left to draw parallels between the two stories to imagine what has become of all the characters. I enjoyed the first part of this book - I found the characters of Coop and Claire (as well as their mostly mute father) interesting, and I could have used another couple hundred pages on their futures. Anna, to me, was the most annoying character of the book - and the second half of the novel was painfully difficult to get through. Obviously Ondaatje wanted to do something a little more creative and literary than merely tell a chronological story about a couple lost souls. But, I think that is the story I would have preferred to read.