"a tale told backwards and a tale told first"

While on my honeymoon I passed a few languid days reading the delicately drawn Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje. It's an amazing book, my favorite read in many years. It's almost two or three novellas in one. Ondaatje picks up the beginning strands of a few different stories and weaves them very loosely together into this diptych of a narrative that wanders from Northern California through seedy bars of Reno, Nevada to the bucolic fields of Southern France. His writing, as always, is stunning, completely enchanting, and almost hauntingly elegiac in tone.

It's a book about the divisions and changes that happen in one's life and about the ways in which try, however clumsily, to glue back together the broken glass shards of the past. Then maybe, we can peer through all its scratches and dents to see something that is both old and new. Check out this interview (his voice is as luscious as his prose) from npr.