A & E

Or, Ondaatje adds, "it might derive from the word divisar, meaning to gaze at a distance."

Either applies here, since images of division and distance-gazing abound in this beautifully crafted tale of separated sisters and torn-apart lovers, a story that ranges from the California Sierras to the South of France, and over decades.

Ondaatje is a poet as well as a novelist, and it's fair to say that his novels also are poems, their interlocking character lines and storylines defined by parallelism and metaphor, as much as by action and chronology. Not everyone will be drawn into this fractured and time-shuffled narrative. "Divisadero" is a prose-film as much as a prose-poem, and is sure to make a stunning film, as Ondaatje's "The English Patient" did.

Three children grow up together in the Sierra foothills. Anna's mother has died in childbirth, and her father adopts Claire, the child of another mother who also died that week. Earlier the father, never named in the book, had taken in Coop, child and only survivor of a neighbor family murdered by a deranged farmhand.

Anna, who will later become a writer, seems to be the implicit narrator of the book, even though much of it is told in third person. The father is distant, hardworking and seldom shows affection. Claire develops a love for horses and is nearly trampled by one -- but is saved by Coop.

Coop, four years older, sets out to restore the abandoned cabin farther uphill. Anna, now 16, visits him there, and the two become lovers. They are discovered by her father, who savagely beats Coop -- the first of two horrendous beatings Coop takes in this novel.

Anna runs away, never to see the farm again.

From this division will spring the separate lives and destinies of Anna, Claire and Coop, none to meet again for years to come. Ondaatje moves skillfully through their separate stories, following a storyline formed not by direct actions but from divisions, separations and gaps in time.

Coop, with another woman, wakes to see her watching him, "and he feared suddenly that she looked like Anna. He did not know whether she was a lens to focus the past or a fog to obscure it."

However, metaphor is scaffolding and refrain for a novelist such as Ondaatje, who knows the value of dramatic action and strong, sympathetic characters, and is working at his peak in this book. Among the similes, there also are card sharks and gypsies, a whole string of lovers and betrayals, carnivals, casinos and even a (suitably dead) French poet.

The essence of this fine novel, of its action as well as its atmosphere, is summed up in its haiku-like closing sentence: "Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible."

David Walton, who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh in Oakland, is the author of "Ride" and winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for his short-story collection "Evening Out."