[[notes]] I just watched the movie and I was kind of shocked how it made me a whole lot more emotional than reading the book itself. Julianne Moore made this story feels believable for me. Splendid casting.

——————

This book was so weird.
Made even weirder by that epilogue.

This is the first book I read that I did not like the epilogue.

I just didn't feel 'danger' or 'passion' for that matter. It didn't jump off the page for me. I wouldn't have finished it at all if I wasn't ill with the flu. You know, lethargy and all. That was the only reason I didn't mark this as dnf.

The voices in this had this flat tone to them which was strange considering a large chunk of the book talked about singing and opera and passion. I think at times it veered into this sort of fatasy land. Maybe it's the author’s real intention to show us how Stockholm Syndrome felt? Possibly though I'm not sure. I just cannot really see how everyone could love opera that much. Because everyone in this LOVED opera THAT MUCH.

It felt like the author didn't follow through and just left a lot of things out. I mean a lot!. Disoriented was a fitting description of how i felt after turning the last page. I was actually laughing but then I have a tendency to laugh when things got too preposterous. I wouldn't say it was that in this case but it got pretty close.

Of course, it was devastating for kidnappers and kidnappees alike. But I felt almost no sadness for any of them when the rescue happened since I already knew the outcome anyway, the author told us early on.

The end of the hostage situation and the epilogue have this gaping hole left open. And there's a disconnect between those two events that I wish we got to get a glimpse of, if not a chapter.

I still to this day, a week later, wonder why the author didn't just show us.

When I started this it was my first Ann Patchett book. . . .and could not stay with it. I wandered for months before reining myself in to finish - oddly enough one of the books I strayed to was the author's Dutch House - which I loved!

Her writing is artful, and wrapped around the right story I'm entranced. But Bel Canto didn't do me. Even so, I will continue to add her to my list.

One of my favourite shows is Buffy the Vampire Slayer (I could get into why, but then we’d be here all day). One of the villains in the second season is a vampire named Spike. He’s a cold and ruthless antagonist, but then in season four he gets metaphorically declawed. With a chip in his head that causes him intense pain if he harms humans, Spike is neutralized as a threat. He spends a good deal of that season tied up in Xander’s basement. It becomes a running joke, in fact, how harmless he is, and gradually Spike transforms from villain to non-entity to ally. It’s one of the many subtle, long-term arcs that contribute to Buffy’s greatness.

The hostage situation in Bel Canto reminds me of this subtle transformation. It lasts a matter of months, but in those months Ann Patchett manages to make one care about a dizzying array of characters, hostages and terrorists alike. This is a beautiful book. The prose is lyrical without feeling like it’s overdone. At first the emphasis on description over dialogue annoyed me, but I gradually allowed myself to become seduced by the way Patchett would dip in and out of each character’s thoughts, sharing along the way some of their background story.

The multiplicity of these stories is key to Bel Canto and its ensemble cast. Although Patchett focuses on a small core of characters, even her most minor characters have a detailed, comprehensive backstory that provides their motivation. None of Patchett’s characters are stock, because she can always justify who they are. Normally this would be overwhelming, but the timeless, ambling quality of the narrative allow Patchett this type of freedom in her characterization.

See, Bel Canto exists in that fringe space of absurd that straddles reality and fiction. On the one hand, it seems so implausible that a group of terrorists this incompetent could show up at a party to kidnap a president who isn’t there and wind up babysitting hostages for four months. On the other hand, situations this long have happened before. In this case, however, the combination of the terrorists’ abject failure to get what they want and the duration of the standoff contributes to a kind of mutual Stockholm syndrome. While the distinction between terrorist and hostage never disappears, the barriers to civility do, and gradually the Vice President’s house becomes a kind of community of unhappy circumstance.

It’s a bit like a lab experiment. Patchett puts these people under the microscope in a controlled environment and watches them react. Because all of the characters have different ways of coping with their isolation, with the separation from their loved ones, with the sense of dread accompanying the knowledge that this can’t go on forever. Indeed, like many once-in-a-lifetime events, the standoff is a cathartic and life-changing experience for those involved. Mr. Hosokawa enters the house as a lover of opera—it is his passion to the exclusion of almost all other pleasures, including those of his family, who perplex and bewilder him more than they do provide warmth and companionship. Gen enters as an employee of Mr. Hosokawa, nothing more, but he gradually discovers within himself a capacity and ambition he had not recognized before. Vice President Iglesias undergoes perhaps one of the more interesting transformations, for he decides his role as host continues and begins obsessively tidying the house and cleaning up after people. In a situation where he is powerless to change their circumstances, he seizes upon what little power he has to make things better.

Strangely enough, however, Patchett captures the nature of this transformation best when describing a fairly minor character. Tetsuya Kato is one of Mr. Hosokowa’s corporate vice presidents and accompanied him to the party. When Roxanne Coss decides she must begin practising again, we learn that Kato can play the piano—he can, in fact, play it beautifully. At first this revelation is a convenient plot point and emphasizes one of the book’s themes, which is that people are full of surprises and have all these hidden talents we don’t know about because we don’t necessarily ask. But there’s something deeper going on here, and I’ll quote from the only paragraph I bothered sticky-noting in this book:

They spoke to one another by handing leaves of music back and forth. While their relationship was by no means a democracy, Kato, who read the music the priest’s friend had sent while lying on the pile of coats he slept on at night, would sometimes pick out pieces he wanted to hear or pieces that he felt would be well suited to Roxanne’s voice. He made what he felt to be wild presumptions in handing over his suggestions, but what did it matter? He was a vice president in a giant corporation, a numbers man, suddenly elevated to be the accompanist. He was not himself. He was no one he had ever imagined.

That last line really resonates with me. Hosokawa, Gen, Iglesias, Kato … the hostage situation prompts a profound crisis of identity in these people, and they find themselves not just stepping from their comfort zone but leaving it behind entirely. But Patchett makes it happen so fluidly and so beautifully that it feels natural.

I’m not a fan of opera. It’s not that I dislike opera; I just haven’t listened to it that much. I have enough trouble deciphering song lyrics I know are in English…. Anyway. I know for some people, Patchett’s decision to use opera as a metaphorical way to unify the story detracted from their enjoyment of it. Fair enough. However, Patchett is doing more than talking about opera. That’s how it starts, but pretty soon the metaphor extends into music in general. Patchett reifies the spiritual reverence we as humans accord to the experience of music. When Roxanne sings, she literally stops the terrorists in their tracks, momentarily making them hostages to her voice. I may not have listened to much opera, but I understand the power of the human voice. It’s in the orator whose speech sways the crowds not just because of the words but the way they’re spoken. I love just sitting in my reading chair late at night, a cup of tea by my side, with the haunting vocals of someone like Florence + The Machine as company. In a medium with no sound, Patchett harnesses something primal about our sense of hearing and asks one to listen.

In case it’s not clear, I’ve fallen for Bel Canto. It’s beautiful as a work of literature. It’s beautiful as a reading experience. I’ve fallen for it so hard that it’s difficult for me to evaluate it critically, because honestly, I just want to close my eyes and bask in Patchett’s luxurious narration of everyone’s thoughts and desires.

And then there’s the ending.

It’s not a stretch to say I felt betrayed by the ending, at least in the first few seconds of seeing the scene play out on the page. To be fair, Patchett foreshadows the hell out of this thing, reminding us that despite what some of the characters might hope, nothing can last forever. Except that, thanks to the way Patchett writes, this situation seems like it could defy such a truism. The story has a quality of timelessness to it. Yet something, as they say, has to give. I understand that, but I was so invested in these characters that I wanted them to get out alive. Not all of them, mind you—I didn’t care what happened to the Generals, not even Benjamin. But to see Hosokawa and Carmen brutally cut down like that … that hurt. I wanted a happy ending for Carmen and Gen so badly.

I don’t feel cheated though. As I said, the ending makes sense given the story Patchett has written. The characters who survive are changed, their paths in life altered, even warped unrecognizably by their experience. They have a new perspective on what it means to live. Fortunately, I don’t have to endure four months of being hostage for such transformation, or even a few weeks in Xander’s basement … I just have to read books like Bel Canto.

n  n

Dull, unlovable characters, flat language...

I wanted to like this book; really I did! A hostage situation? Beautiful people with their lives at stake? It sounded like a recipe for success. Patchett, however, took a good thing and smashed it into the ground. She bit off more than she could chew and both character and plot development suffered for it. It was as though she would actually have a good thought and then go: "wait, I need to explain the background of this good thought," go on a 3 page tangent, lose the thought that she had, and continue sucking.

This review is harsh, to be sure, but it seems all the books I'm picking up lately are just boring, boring, boring.

C'mon literary world! Give us something we can really get lost in!

The year was 2003, the year that I graduated from high school. I was reading Taming of the Shrew by The Bard himself.

In the fall, I would be attending Kalamazoo College who decided hey let's stress these little college freshmen out by assigning them this book over the summer.

I dropped Taming of the Shrew, never to be picked up again, and I began reading this book. Because I am an overachiever (and Netflix didn't exist at the time), I read this book twice.

And I hated it. It reads like a soap opera but not in a good way. It was the beginning of a nearly 10 year reading slump. What would my life have been like if I hadn't put down Shakespeare?

How the New York Times thought that this was one of the best books of the 21st century beats me.

2025 Reading Schedule
JantA Town Like Alice
FebtBirdsong
MartCaptain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
AprtWar and Peace
MaytThe Woman in White
JuntAtonement
JultThe Shadow of the Wind
AugtJude the Obscure
SeptUlysses
OcttVanity Fair
NovtA Fine Balance
DectGerminal

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This is my favorite Ann Patchett novel. Her style of writing is smooth and I find some of her prose sublime. And this one just absolutely captured a certain place in a certain time with a unique mood that covered the entire like chocolate around a perfect Michigan cherry.

If I would have liked the characters just a bit more and knew what really cored the Opera obsession for one of the characters it would have been a pure 5. 4.5 as it is.

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto (Harper, 2001)

I have spent quite a while mulling this over, and have finally come to the conclusion that, patterned after Greek tragic opera or not, I can't forgive Ann Patchett for the climax of this novel. Much of that has to do with the beginning of the novel; I'd have been inclined to be more forgiving had the first hundred pages not moved at a snail's pace. But the book finally picked up, everything was going along swimmingly, and then, suddenly, bam-the most predictable possible climax.

The story is based on accounts of the guerrilla takeover of the Peruvian embassy in 1992, but Patchett moves the action to another, unnamed, South American country and adds a few extra ingredients into the mix. In Patchett's story, opera singer Roxane Coss has been lured to the embassy for the birthday party of a wealthy Japanese industrialist whom the country hopes will build a factory there. During the festivities, the guerrillas invade, and a hostage situation begins. It drags on, and soon the strict militarism with which the siege begins evolves into a more relaxed system, where the line between terrorist and hostage begins to blur.

It's after that line begins to blur that the book really takes hold. The original three chapters, that describe the scene and introduce us to most of the main characters, are painfully slow. Patchett hits her stride, and the book takes off. For the middle two hundred pages, it's easy to see why the book won the Orange Prize and was shortlisted for so many others.

Then comes the climax. My initial reaction is that it was the biggest letdown I'd had in a novel in a number of years, and that's saying something. After some discussion, I tried to accept it as the pace and events of the book being modeled on Greek tragic opera (where such clichés as the climax of this novel were coined). I don't know enough about Greek tragic opera to really make a judgment one way or the other as to the accuracy of Patchett's patterning. I do know that in modern reinterpretations of older works (think Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres for an excellent example), what we often change is what has become clichéd in the years since the work was originally written. Such is not the case here, and it certainly kept me from enjoying the book as a whole as much as I otherwise would have.

Great middle. Mediocre beginning. Awful ending. Still, the hundred pages that are worth saving are remarkable, and worth the price of admission. ** ½

All in all a little too sugar-coated for my taste – the discovered friendships, unlikely loves, the pervading beauty of every damn thing . . . And the purported passion surrounding one of the most important elements, opera, was unconvincing. It felt largely like a vacuous prop to be honest, like rattling off a list of arias to prove yourself a connoisseur of the beautiful.

But the writing was decent and I decided about a quarter of the way through I shouldn’t be too hard-hearted (and the book aimed to soften the petrified heart). I should just try to enjoy it, which, following my snobotomy, I guess I did. But I don’t think it was a marvel of modern literature, or that it deserved the PEN/Faulkner award. I took a look at the list of PEN/Faulkner award winners and have to say those I’ve read were in another league.

Finally, the end asked too much of me in terms of plausibility. Not to be mysterious. If you read it, you know what I mean.

Or maybe you loved it. My mother did, which is why I read it at all. My mother begged me to read it, as she sometimes does with books she's enjoyed. It is hard not to try to comply once in a while. Still, she just read another Ann Patchett book about a magician and I’m going to have to tell her I’m passing on that one. . . She also loved “The Kite Runner” and whatever that writer’s new book is. I got a very long begging on that, but my snobotomy only goes so far...

This was such a beautiful book, more about love than terrorism, the prospect of losing love, and the impossibility of love under some circumstances as well as its possibility only under special circumstances - what could have been, if only... It's very loosely based on the taking of the Japanese embassy in Peru by Sendero Luminoso - that serves as more of a starting point than anything else - but anyone who appreciates impossible love, or has lived it, can appreciate this book.

(Added January 2024: the state of Florida has blacklisted this book in schools, and what better recommendation can you ask for? As Ann Patchett said, you'd think that a book where a group is unsatisfied with the government decides to take matters in their own hands to overthrow said government would be just the message they'd embrace but no - maybe it's because they haven't even read it?)

I read this book because my girlfriend--who loved it--recommended it to me. She also implied that I could stand to girly up my reading list a little, which is probably fair. Man does not live by novelizations of '70s cop movies and '80s slasher movie tie-ins alone.

Anyway, I thought it was good. The characters were all likable and the story was engaging, if wholly improbable (Bel Canto could just as easily have been titled The Lighter Side of Stockholm Syndrome). My main problem with it was the writing style, which I really didn't care for. Each sentence is perfectly crafted, and would make any MFA writing professor thrilled, but therein lies the problem. The writing is so well-crafted sentence by sentence that it ends up being somewhat characterless and a little dull in large portions. The prose in Bel Canto almost seemed as if it was written to specifically defy any editorial criticisms. It does this with aplomb, but the problem is that it never takes any risks either.

Great hostage situation in which individual character studies unfold. As we get to know the characters, they are getting to know (and love) each other. A reciprocity develops where the captors and captives become fond and used to one another, despite the inevitable upshot. The reader enjoys seeing these kinships develop, even though they are impossible. Opera singing, music, and languages as sub-plots enhance the story in unique ways as well. I can see why this won so many awards.

yes, i have just discovered betterbooktitles.com