Picking up the pieces

“I come from Divisadero Street,” Anna tells us in Michael Ondaatje’s fifth novel. “Divisadero, from the Spanish word for ‘division,’ the street that at one time was the dividing line between San Francisco and the fields of the Presidio. Or it might derive from the word divisar, meaning ‘to gaze at something from a distance.’ ”

This claim about Anna’s origins, which arrives midway through Ondaatje’s restless book, we know to be false. For the story begins in Anna’s childhood, as she grows up on a farm in Northern California with her father, her sister, Claire, and an adopted farmhand, Coop — only four years older than the sisters, who are, ostensibly, twins. And yet this too is not quite the truth…