Brian Dillon writes:

Divisadero is the sort of book that makes you wonder what some people are after when they open a novel. Vapid nostrums dressed as timeless wisdom? Pretty vignettes from a simpler life? Flowery assurance that this simpler life conceals, would you believe it, a seam of tragedy? Cooking tips? Whatever it is, it is all there, and they are welcome to it. Ondaatje takes some of the techniques that we might value most in fiction – the formal refutation of strict chronology; the elaboration of character as little more than a rumour or a scattering of particles; a narrator’s capacious sense of literary and intellectual history – and drains them of all energy, wit, mystery and real ambition.

(LRB 13 December 2007)

Bloomsbury | hardback 273 pp. |ISBN: 9780747589242