Writing a
review of Bel Canto feels like
writing the obituary of a long-lost friend who has just been found.
It touches
something inside – something rarely feel-able
in this time of so much contention among so many different warring creeds,
peoples, and thoughts. It reminds me that while something may have passed away
from a troubled world, deep-down we may yet be touched anew and energized at
rare times in our lives. Bel Canto
heralds one of those times.
It is a feeling
of love. Real love, universal love, not the everyday family-and-friends type, but the kind that extends to all people at all
times and which resonates with Jesus’ declaration that he has come, died and
been resurrected for “all people.”
So while I write
at the beginning of Holy Week, it is still a tough review to write for other reasons.
The story is too beautiful to commit to the mere words of another writer. Patchett
is the only person who could have written it. She is a “virtuoso,” says her
publisher Harper Collins. And Bel Canto is her “most exquisite” work, The New
York Times writes. In other words, you have to read it to get it.
Set in an
unnamed Latin American city, a lavish reception for a visiting world-class
opera singer is interrupted by a terrorist attack. A rough-hewn but disciplined
band of armed thugs from the jungle forces everyone – the celebrated opera star
included – to the floor and the warriors take over, making their nonnegotiable
demands of the authorities which soon arrive outside the walled compound of he
nation’s vice-presidential mansion.
Sounds like
game, set, match … but the book’s just getting started when that happens. Its
beauty is to come in the unfolding, which is simply one of the most remarkable
stories I have ever read. At first it moves along at a barely perceptible pace.
But you can feel it. Then you see a larger story building itself, bejeweled along
the way by a strange and unexpected symbiosis of terrorists and their high-toned
captives.
“…he had no secrets then and now he did: it
was that now there was something that was strictly between himself and one
other person, that it was something that was completely their own that it would
have been pointless to even try to speak of it to someone else…”
That’s it.
Anything else would be what they call “spoilers". So spoil yourself, and read
this amazing piece of literary genius.
And, of course,
you can always buy it through Ms. Patchett’s now-famous Nashville bookstore,
Parnassus Books.
* * *
Click here for a link to Parnassus Books
And here for a link to Ann Patchett’s interview with TerryGross on NPR’s Fresh Air
And here for a New York Times review of Ms. Patchett’s
latest book, along with commentary on her style and career.
