“Ravishing and intricate . . . Few experiences in contemporary fiction are as sensual and absorbing as making one’s way through the pages of an Ondaatje novel. . . . Divisadero is an epic of intimate moments . . . The book is, among other things, a parable of contemporary America . . . When people call Ondaatje a poetic novelist, they are referring in part, of course, to his rare gift for language and observation. A scene of a boy on a runaway horse during an eclipse is as astonishing and hallucinatory as any such passage I can remember reading. Yet the deeper aspect of his poetic background is that his narratives proceed with the interlaced complexity of a long lyric poem . . . Each of the romances in the book is gorgeous and singular in its effects . . . Ondaatje’s ability to fashion scenes that are at once exact and suggestive accounts not only for the sensual tingle of the books, but also for their literary pleasures . . . Divisadero extends the liberating and original territory of that earlier triumph [The English Patient] so unforgettably that it’s hard, on finishing, not to turn back to the opening page and start all over.” (Pico Iyer, New York Review of Books)     

“Exquisitely crafted and imbued with Ondaatje’s acutely sensitive intelligence, Divisadero pulls its readers inside the novelist’s craft like being inside an intricate pocket watch to learn its movements.” (Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) 

“Ondaatje’s best books are kaleidoscopic meditations on memory, violence, time and sexuality are held together less by linearity than by rhyming action, thematic echoing and inspired juxtaposition . . . One doesn’t come to Ondaatje for resolution. One comes for the language, the discreet imagined moments, the exact metaphors, the turn of a phrase - and for the thrill of watching a writer attempting, and for the most part, succeeding, in his desire, through juxtaposition, to make the world more than it is.” (Ethan Rutherford, Minneapolis Star-Tribune)