“Bel Canto” sold moderately in hardcover, but hearty paperback sales and a sprinkling of prizes, including the PEN /Faulkner, put a conspicuous shine on a rare achievement, a captivating blend of political drama and aesthetic passion. In the pessimistic halls of literary fiction, she speaks up, gently but firmly, for human potential. But Patchett’s point, not only in this novel but in her well-regarded earlier three, seems to be that everybody is nice, given half a chance. One revolutionary ends thus: “A pain exploded up high in her chest and spit her out of this terrible world.”īut this terrible world also holds art and love of the book’s many rave reviews, one called “Bel Canto” “the most romantic novel in years” and another promised readers that they would experience “a strange yearning to be kidnapped.” The sole complaint about the saga that this reader heard was a protest, from a rigorous Jewish critic, that terrorists weren’t really so nice. Two of the peasant soldiers turn out to be female, and a Mozartean weave of amorous attraction, lessons in literacy, and companionable soccer games unfurls before the tragic dénouement. The coup thus fails at the outset negotiations drag on while government forces tunnel beneath the mansion and, in the barricaded cohabitation of hostages and hostage-takers, the illeducated young rebels, exposed to the international array of refined party guests, reveal great talents for singing, chess, and romance.
Their hope is to kidnap the President, but he does not attend.
Hosokawa, with a special performance by the internationally esteemed lyric soprano Roxane Coss, whom he has long loved from afar-is invaded by a tiny army of terrorists, consisting of three revolutionary “generals” and fifteen youthful recruits from the impoverished countryside. A lavish party-designed by the government to court the Japanese industrialist Mr. Patchett’s customarily benign view of human nature took on global import within the besieged mansion of a Peru-like nation’s Vice-President. Her arresting, elegant thriller cast a hostage crisis in a nameless Latin-American capital as an operatic illustration of the well-known truism that captives and captors tend, as the days of mutual exposure draw on, to develop solidarity with one another. Before “Bel Canto,” she had been admired but obscure, a veteran of academic postings and the grant wars. PAUL HAMLYNĪnn Patchett has not rushed to follow up her breakthrough novel, “Bel Canto” (2001), which promoted her from private to major in the embattled ranks of literary novelists. Patchett gives us the world as it should be.
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