Divisadero

Notes on Divisadero.

Divisadero comes from the Spanish divisar, to make something out at a distance. Michael Ondaatje found the word on a street sign in San Francisco, the old line that once separated the city from the Presidio's open fields, and built a novel around the idea that a name can hold a geography inside it. His book ends the way it begins, at a height: a daughter, much older now, standing on a hill in Provence and looking down at the road her father took thirty years before. Nothing resolves. She only sees further.