Hemingway wrote about raucous bull runs in Pamplona. Fitzgerald wrote about glitzy New York. Steinbeck wrote about a Depression era Monterey. And though it may not seem a likely foundation for an award-winning best seller, Michael Ondaatje wrote about the farm towns of Northern California.
Ondaatje uses the Central Valley and its Northern California surroundings for the backdrop of his latest novel, “Divisadero.”
Ondaatje, best known for “The English Patient,” will be reading excerpts from “Divisadero” on Thursday at the Hammer Museum as part of the museum’s New American Writing series. The series features new and young writers as well as older, established writers, such as Ondaatje, who has been publishing distinguished poetry and prose for more than 40 years.
“To see an author firsthand with no intermediaries, no filters, no edits is one of the great human pleasures,” said Ben Weissman, the series curator. “It’s better than any play or film. It’s hard to do and it’s humbling.”
Ondaatje began writing at the University of Toronto, eventually touching on the genres of poetry, fiction, nonfiction and memoirs.
“The intent was never to get published. It was more the act of writing. It was a way to clarify what I was feeling. Putting order to one’s chaos and shape it on the page,” Ondaatje said.
The story for “Divisadero” stemmed from Ondaatje’s time teaching as a professor at Stanford and his experience in the Petaluma area in Northern California.
The novel focuses on a single father, his two daughters, Anna and Claire, and an orphaned boy named Coop and their attempt to reconcile a shifting present that is always shadowed by the past.
“The novel is a story about a nuclear family that isn’t quite nuclear,” Ondaatje said. “I think it’s interesting how we grow up with our siblings and 20 years later we’re living in a different country or divorced with a different life.”
Ondaatje’s voice for personal accounts made a quick fan out of Stephanie Sapienza, a graduate student with the Moving Image Archive Studies program at UCLA who taught “The English Patient” in the fall for English 4W.
“Ondaatje explores the idea of unwritten versus popular histories,” Sapienza said. “A lot of high schools focus on getting students acquainted with these popular versions of history, so I think its good for students to explore the fallibility of this idea. History is really a collection of small, personal narratives.”
Ondaatje weaves the intricacies of past and present relationships through “Divisadero,” following the characters as they attempt to move toward their own future.
“We are formed by the people we meet,” Ondaatje said. “Someone you fall in love with at the age of 16 or someone you meet on a train at 19 will stay with you for the rest of your life.”
The novel breaks into two narratives, those of the daughters Anna and Claire, and by flashing in and out from location to location and from story to story, Ondaatje offers two very different paths embedded with subtle connections.
“(The nonlinear structure) resembles how human memory works, which is usually not linear in any way, revealing certain things at certain times,” Sapienza said.
Sapienza was the only professor or teaching assistant to teach any of Ondaatje’s works at UCLA this year.
“It’s interesting for students to see something that broke from the norm,” Sapienza said. “I wanted to choose something that was more accessible but completely different than what many of the students have probably read.”
With Ondaatje appearing at the Hammer for the first time ever on Thursday, the award-winning author will become more accessible than ever.
“As a writer I loved going to readings,” Ondaatje said. “All you have to do is hear the author for 10 minutes, and you can read with their voice in your ear.”