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“Ondaatje assembles discerning portraits of haunted, familiar souls who are married to their memories, doing what they must
in solitary attempts at understanding.”
Review
In his first novel in seven years, Michael Ondaatje picks up where he left off by returning to the themes he likes best: loss, memory, and love. With vivid lyricism and moments of intense insight, his latest novel is an expansive project, charting the connections that
join lives over many decades.
Divisadero opens on a farm in California, where the main voice of the novel, Anna, grows up with her father, her adopted sister Claire,
and an adopted farmhand, Coop. In a moment that repeats throughout the novel, the notion of family falls apart when Anna and
Coop have a brush with adulthood, in the form of a secret life together. Discovery leads to a violent incident that reverberates
as the family is divided.
From there, Ondaatje continues as he has in his other works, mapping the intersections of seemingly unrelated lives and the
remnants of memory that follow them. Coop finds a home in the casinos of Tahoe, but is stalked by violence until he has a chance reunion with Claire. We meet an adult Anna, who moves to Southern France to study the life of a once-famous writer by collecting the traces and people he left behind.
Unlike The English Patient or Anil's Ghost, both of which were set during wartime, this work lacks a strong external framework. The stories in Divisadero are much more loosely woven together, leaving it to the reader to trace the parallel lives and the echoes they share. While
Ondaatje's characters emerge strongly (continuing his trend of well-written heroines), their stories are left with loose ends.
Nevertheless, Ondaatje continues to excel at revealing how violence is absorbed through memory. Whether the products of war
or loss, brutal moments set his characters' lives on collision courses or drive them irrevocably apart. Divisadero assembles discerning portraits of haunted, familiar souls who are married to their memories, doing what they must in solitary
attempts at understanding.
- Lauren Sommer
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“Sweaters, dust, chairs, cars, tennis balls, pencils, and cleaning products become transformative objects that interact with
the artist's subjects and audience to create unique, temporary sculptures.”
Review
In "Splendor and Secrets of the Evident," the erudite essay that accompanies The Artist Who Swallowed the World — Erwin Wurm's squishy, hot-pink monograph — Robert Pfaller states that "recognizing the jokes in Wurm's works and being
able to find them funny requires no great preknowledge or interpretative effort." This is one of the keys to Wurm's success
as an artist: although his sculptures, videos, photographs, and performative installations overflow with lofty references
to philosophers, architects, and his artistic peers, one need not wield a press release to get his amusing and thought-provoking gist.
Unlike most artist monographs, in which half of the pages tend to be taken over by the musings of curators, critics, and anyone
else who cares to weigh in on the artist's career and reputation, The Artist Who Swallowed the World is dominated by images whose power is intermittently punctuated by the artist's own doodles, quotes, and notes. Wurm's materials
and subjects are the familiar objects, structures, and relationships of daily life. Like Robert Gober, he fixates on domestic settings and quotidian, functional objects, shifting their presentation to force his audience to confront them in a new way.
Sweaters, dust, chairs, cars, tennis balls, pencils, and cleaning products become transformative objects that interact with the artist's subjects and audience to create unique, temporary sculptures. Participation is crucial to Wurm's work.
Like his countryman Franz West, Wurm invites his viewers to interact with the raw materials of his art, welcoming the inevitable variations produced by
human idiosyncrasies.
This engrossing book makes clear Wurm's desire to connect to the world and to understand and consume it through the production
of art that ceaselessly tunnels through the detritus of media-fueled trends and passing fashion to reveal and question the
pure, essential realities of human existence. By incorporating his own frailties, concerns, and narratives into his work,
Wurm breaks down the barrier between artist and audience, turning his spectators into participants, and, hence, into artists
themselves.
- Allison Kave
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