Divisadero KINDLE MOBI by Michael Ondaatje H.A.

Ondaatje, one of Canada's most successful and respected writers (born in Sri Lanka) has achieved near perfection in Divisadero (2008), which begins in the 1970s, prelapsarian, bucolic, then it shifts to rural France, moving between the first world war and today, plundering the spiritual devastation caused by the violence of our relationships and our wars; stories peel, artichoke-like, to reveal one beneath another. The novel is a meditation on the indistinct roots of literary creation itself; it is busy, shifting, but coiled within it are themes of recurrence, of our shaky identities. In the latter sections, these echoes and recurrences gradually coalesce.
But the stories are not only connected but calibrated by Ondaatje to reveal a haunting pattern of parallels, echoes, and reflections across time and place. Like Nabokov, another master of twinning, Ondaatje's method is deliberate but discreet, and it is only through careful reading that. the intricate play of doubles was revealed. Every sign of the author's genius is here: the searing imagery, the incandescent writing, the calm probing of life's most turbulent and devastating experiences. No one writes as affectingly about passion, about time and memory, about violence--subjects that have shaped Ondaatje's previous novels. But there is a greater muscularity to Divisadero, an intensity born from its restraint. Episodes are boiled down to their essential elements, distilled but dramatic, resulting in a mosaic of profound dignity, with an elegiac quietude that only the greatest of writers can achieve.