Bel Canto
by Ann Patchett
Summary
In an unnamed South American country closely modelled on Peru during the 1996 Japanese embassy hostage crisis, the government throws a birthday party at the vice presidential mansion for Katsumi Hosokawa, a Japanese electronics magnate they hope will build a factory. He has come for one reason only: Roxane Coss, the American soprano he has worshipped on record for years, has been hired to sing. Mid recital the lights go out and armed guerrillas come through the air conditioning vents, hunting a president who stayed home to watch his favourite soap opera.
The wrong hostages having been taken, the siege settles into stalemate, and Patchett's novel does the unexpected thing: it slows down and becomes a book about what several dozen people build inside a suspended world. The women are released, except Roxane; the mansion fills with chess games, cooking lessons and music, because among the young terrorists are unexpected talents, including Carmen, who asks the translator Gen to teach her to read, and a boy whose untrained voice stops the household cold. Hosokawa and Roxane fall in love without a common language; Gen and Carmen fall in love while conjugating verbs in the china closet. Everyone, hostage and captor, quietly stops wanting it to end.
It ends the way sieges end. The epilogue, two survivors marrying in Italy, has been argued about since publication,.
Around three hundred and twenty pages, elegant and unhurried.
Best for readers who want the hostage thriller transposed into chamber music, and do not require realism of an opera.
Historical Context & Significance
Bel Canto won both the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2002, a transatlantic double very few novels have managed, and became a book club fixture translated into more than thirty languages. Ann Patchett took the premise from the news: the 1996 to 1997 Japanese ambassador's residence siege in Lima, in which Túpac Amaru guerrillas held hostages for four months before Peruvian forces stormed the building. She has said the events seemed to have been staged as an opera, and wrote them as one.
It was her fourth novel and the one that made her a national figure, a standing she has spent since on two fronts: the later bestsellers, Commonwealth, The Dutch House and Tom Lake, and Parnassus Books in Nashville, the independent bookstore she co founded, which made her American bookselling's most visible champion.
Jimmy López turned the novel into an opera for Chicago's Lyric Opera in 2015, closing an obvious loop, and a 2018 film starred Julianne Moore and Ken Watanabe.