Divisadero (Spanish) -- To glimpse and to perceive indistinctly; to describe at a distance.

It's very possible that I could write my commentary on Michael Ondaatje's new novel entirely from the sea of epigrams that form its framework.

As in:

"It's like the villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle's form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion."

		"Divisadero" By Michael Ondaatje Knopf ($25)

Or: "We live permanently in the recurrence of our stories, whatever story we tell;" "We enter art to hide within it;" and quoting Nietzsche: "We have art in order that the truth doesn't destroy us."

A villanelle is a poem with repeating refrains from stanza to stanza, but in a different order each time.

In his perplexing new novel, the classic poetic form is a symbol for our lives.

And our job, says Ondaatje, is to decide if we want to be the "heroes of our own lives" or let others write our stories.

And that's really what "Divisadero" is about -- a variation of Ondaatje stories, improbable as they are, that collide with and parallel each other. As the title indicates, the book is "a point where you can look far into the distance."

There are three variations in this short, 273-page work:

Anna, Claire and Coop, three young Californians raised together on a ranch whose idyllic lives are abruptly sundered.

Lucien Segura, an early- 20th-century French poet and novelist whose personal life is troubled by his relationship with Marie-Neige, an illiterate peasant woman whom he teaches how to read.

Liebard, Aria and Rafael, husband, wife and child, Romany travelers of France who work with the aging Segura to restore an old farm.

Anna is the narrator of this trio. She comes to contemporary France to study the late French writer and then has an affair with the adult Rafael. He is the link to Segura's youth and growth as a novelist.

Connection is Ondaajte's motif in this lyrical yet preternaturally calm work about emotional disruption, frustrated love and desperate, desperate alone-ness.

Events echo other events, words and phrases reoccur across the years and images repeat themselves.

Anna says, "With memory, with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways. We can circle time. A paragraph or an episode from another era will haunt us in the night, as the words of a stranger can."

It's easy to become hypnotized by Ondaatje's singularly beautiful and careful words that lull us into overlooking the improbability of his stories and the vagueness of his voices.

Anna is the center of this book, yet her voice is indistinguishable from Claire's or Segura's, for that matter. Ultimately, we must turn everything over to Ondaatje and leave the inconsistencies alone.

Exquisitely crafted and imbued with Ondaatje's acutely sensitive intelligence, "Divisadero" pulls its readers inside the novelist's craft ("I love the performance of a craft. ... I am interested only in the care taken," writes Segura) like being inside an intricate pocket watch to learn its movements.