Bel Canto
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award • Winner of the Orange Prize • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • New York Times Readers’ Pick: Top 100 Books of the 21st Century
"Bel Canto is its own universe. A marvel of a book." —Washington Post Book World
Ann Patchett’s spellbinding novel about love and opera, and the unifying ways people learn to communicate across cultural barriers in times of crisis.
Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening—until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots, intimate friends, and lovers.
Patchett's lyrical prose and lucid imagination make Bel Canto a captivating story of strength and frailty, love and imprisonment, and an inspiring tale of transcendent romance.
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Community Reviews
Patchett's writing is superb, her descriptions simple and often sublime. But this story, about the unexpected connections made between hostages and terrorists, and about how love of music can become the universal language in situations where people enclosed together do not speak the same language, began to feel overly romanticized, and the epilogue a bit jarring.
The novel seems to be loosely based on a true case of a long drawn out hostage situation in Peru in 1991, and Patchett never names the country, though it's clearly set in South America. When American opera star Roxanne Coss is taken hostage along with about 100 guests at a party to honor an important Japanese businessman, the drama at first focuses on how the hostages will survive, physically and psychologically. But as their hostage crisis drags out into their new normal, the tension of their situation wanes; romantic entanglements develop, both of which are really hard to believe, given either the language and/or total culture gap.
Also, the generals of the terrorist "army" that planned the takeover are portrayed a little too sympathetically. Even the hostages come to almost "like" them, and while this may relate to what is known as the Stockholm Syndrome, it felt a bit false.
I think the novel would have benefitted from being shorter and less romantic about the power of music (especially opera, which is clearly an acquired taste) to bring opposites together.
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