In The Skin Of A Lion - Closing

Hana sat upright, adapting the rear-view mirror to her height. He climbed in, pretending to luxuriate in the passenger seat, making animal-like noises of satisfaction.

-- Lights, he said.

In The Skin Of A Lion - pg.129

These were days that really belonged to the moon.

In The Skin Of A Lion - pg. 15

Hazen Lewis was an abashed man, withdrawn from the world around him, uninterested in the habits of civilization outside his own focus. He would step up to his horse and assume it, as if it were a train, as if flesh and blood did not exist.

In The Skin Of A Lion - pg. 15

In the drive-shed Hazen Lewsi outlined the boy's body onto the plank walls with green chalk. Then he tacked wires back and forth across the outline as if realigning the veins in his son's frame. Muscles of cordite and the spine a tributary of the black powder fuse. This is how the boy remembers his father, studying the outline which the boy has just stepped away from as the lit fuse smoulders up and blows out a section of plank where the head had been.

In The Skin Of A Lion - Opening

IF HE IS AWAKE early enough the boy sees the men walk past the farmhouse down First Lake Road. Then he stands at the bedroom window and watches: he can see two or three lanterns between the soft maple and the walnut tree. He hears their boot on gravel. Thirty loggers, wrapped up dark, carrying axes and small packages of food which hang from their belts. The boy walks downstairs and moves to a window in the kitchen where he can look down the driveway. They move from right to left. Already they seem exhausted, before the energy of the sun.

This is a Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Copyright 1987 by Michael Ondaatje

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

Originally published in Canada by McClelland and Stewart Limited, Toronto.

Divisadero - Closing

Lucien pushes the boat free of the mud shelf and strides beside it through the cloudy water and climbs in. He turns his back to the far shore and rows towards it. He can in this way travel away from, yet still see, his house. Water laps up between the boards, and he feels he is riding a floating skeleton. He is able to distinguish the shape of his small home in the quickening dusk. He wants to stand, to see everything clearly, and at the very moment of his thinking this, a board cracks below him, like the one crucial bone in the body that holds sanity, that protects the road out to the future. His gaze holds on tho this last, porous light. Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible.

Divisadero - pg. 231

But for Lucien, writing was a place of emergency. He wanted what he had done those first few times, without awareness, when the page was a pigeonnier flown into from all the realms one had travelled through. There had been the gathering then, the thrill of diversity. There was no judgment. He had not sought judgment when he began to write, but it had somehow become crucial to hislife. When all he had wanted was to dance with no purpose, with a cat.

Divisadero - pg. 141

We have become unintelligible in our secrets, governed by our previous selves.

Divisadero - pg. 122

When she began to sing, what was surprising was not the power of her voice, or its range from rough to tender, but the confidence she had built up there, as if a great actress were sculpting the air with her arms while drawling like Chryssie Hynde. It was a persona Cooper had not met in all the time he had spent with Bridget. Her subliminal dancing, her yelling back to the crowd, her translation of 'Season of the Witch' into a rough, dangerous blues, left him unmoored from everything he knew about her. He'd never met this woman before.

Divisadero - pg. 76

She and Rafael keep between them a formality that makes them careful with each other. They have stepped into this friendship the way solitaries in medieval times might have bundled together for the night before journeying on towards a destination of marriage or war. So that Anna is not aware that the casualness in Rafael she witnesses is inconsistent with his nature (save for the territorial precision with which he flicked that bee off his guitar in her presence a few days earlier), while he knows scarcely a thing about her. Who is she? This woman who has led him into this medicine cabinet of a room where most of her possessions exist -- books, journals, passport, a carefully folded map, archival tapes, even the soap she has brought with her from her other world. As if this orderly collection of things is what she is. So we fall in love with ghosts.

Divisadero - pg. 75

I'm embarrassed by the size of the other rooms.
Rafael sat on the bed, watching the strip of her energy, tall, erect. Dark jeans, blue shirt, a rolled-up sleeve on her brown arm. He noticed a mirror positioned low on the wall, a low sink.
This room belongs to a child.

Divisadero - pg. 60

They stop for a drink in a roadside bar. Once back in the car, Cooper separates money equally, into four piles, and puts his in an old Northwest Airlines bag. Then they drive again, the last leg, with the windows down, the highway breeze sideswiping him. At one point he slows the car to a halt and she says, 'What is it?' There is an owl on the road, apparently unwilling to leave the heat of the highway, and Coop drives around it and continues. When they reach the bus depot at Tonapah, he sits a moment longer, his hands on the wheel, as if there were still miles to go. They get out and Ruth comes around to the driver's door and they embrace. Coop is going to disappear. He will never these friends again. He pulls out the Northwest Airlines bag and walks away from the car. Ruth starts it and a moment later drives past him -- a tap on the horn, her hand out the window -- but he doesn't acknowledge the second farewell. He has already become a stranger.

Divisadero - pg. 13

Steamboats travelled inland to the furthest point of navigation - as far as the Feather River. And a many-headed civilization arrived. Gamblers, water entrepreneurs, professional shootists, prostitutes, diarists, coffee drinkers, whisky merchants, poets, heroic dogs, mail-order brides, women falling in love with boys who walked within the realm of luck, old men swallowing gold to conceal it on their return journeys to the coast, balloonists, mystics, Lola Montez, opera singers -- good ones, bad ones, those who fornicated their way across the territory. Dynamiters blasted steep grades and the land under your feet. There were seventeen miles of tunnels beneath the town of Iowa Hill. Sonora burned. Weaverville burned. Shasta and Columbia burned. Were rebuilt and burned again and rebuilt again and rebuilt again. Sacramento flooded.

Divisadero - Opening

By our grandfather's cabin, on the high ridge, opposite a slope of buckeye trees, Claire sits on her horse, wrapped in a thick blanket. She has camped all night and lit a fire in the hearth of that small structure our ancestor built more than a generation ago, and which he lived in like a hermit or some creature, when he first came to this country.

First published in Great Britain 2007
Copyright 2007 by Michael Ondaatje

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
36 Soho Square
London W1D 3QY

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library


Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

The paper this book is printed on is certified by the 1996 Forest
Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient forest friendly.
The printer holds FSC chain of custody SGS-COC-2061

For John and Beverly

and in loving memory of Creon Corea

--remembered by us as 'Egilly'

Michael Ondaatje - Divisadero