alisonrose711 's review for:

Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

2.0

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This book was kind of odd and disappointing. The writing is beautiful - he definitely has some amazing prose within him and there were a lot of sentences and passages that were just lovely. And some parts of the first 2/3 of the book were well-crafted. But the problem was they were just parts and often the ones I liked did not go on long enough, and the ones I didn't seemed to go on and on...and on. And then the whole weirdness of the last third of the book basically suddenly dropping all the main characters and turning into a different book. It felt so strange - nothing felt resolved at all and then you're reading about this other dude with only a tangential relationship to the earlier portion of the novel. And then very very briefly near the end one of the main characters pops up again. It just didn't work for me. I would not have minded a chapter or two about Lucien, but this felt like two books weirdly mushed into one, and neither being complete.