Read This One: C Pam Zhang on Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero

“Reading Ondaatje is like taking a road trip with your oddest but most trustworthy and intelligent friend. You can’t predict where you’re going, but you can relax into being a passenger. Authority draws me to a piece of writing above all else; it rises above style or genre.”

Three of C Pam Zhang’s Recommended Accompaniments for Divisadero:
A long walk
Dappled light
Very large sunglasses (for the light, and also for hiding tears)

For this series, I ask writers I admire to recommend a book. I read it, then we talk about it. For this installment, C Pam Zhang recommended Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje.

C Pam Zhang’s debut novel How Much of These Hills is Gold is a shredder of a western about two Chinese orphans trying to bury their father in the waning days of the American gold rush. It’s a beautifully written novel about greed, the rotting corpse of history, and some of the blinding flaws of American self-mythologizing. Somehow both prickly and tender, it refuses to sit still, showing us so much of what we might have missed, and just how much there is to see.

Divisadero is in good company with Zhang’s novel, as it steps into and chops up the past, in a different way. On a prose level, it’s some of the most compelling writing I’ve read in the past year, and structure-wise it follows a trajectory unlike any novel I’ve read before. We leapfrog through time and place, drifting in and out of characters’ heads, both side and main, which makes for a reading experience I can only describe as pure Ondaatje.

—Colin Winnette

THE BELIEVER: To anyone unfamiliar with the book, what would be your quick description of Divisadero?

C PAM ZHANG: A lyrical collage of a book about identity and family and fracture. The thing I usually say to explain—or, perhaps, to excuse Divisadero—is that I heard a rumor that Michael Ondaatje deliberately wrote this book to be non-chronological, and thus un-adaptable, after The English Patient was turned into a movie.

BLVR: Excuse is an interesting word. Do you think there’s something unacceptable about this book? Or something that most readers would find objectionable?

CPZ: Ha. I can be quite the book bully/pedant. There have been a few instances, maybe, of my insisting that a loved one read a book I know is challenging, is perpendicular to their tastes, is downright dense or thorny. Several of those adjectives fit Divisadero, which quietly explodes notions of what a book is supposed to be. I keep hoping that I...