This quiz is about the novel, Bel Canto.

(1)

Title: A Diva among the Hostages

Author(s): Margaret Stead

Publication Details: Times Literary Supplement .5130 (July 27, 2001): p21.

Source: Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 244. Detroit: Gale. From Literature Resource Center.

Document Type: Critical essay

Full Text:

[(review date 27 July 2001) In the following review, Stead praises Bel Canto for its richly developed characters.]

Virginia Woolf said that the most difficult thing in writing fiction was getting her characters from one room to the next. In choosing to base her novel on the 1997 siege of the Japanese embassy in Peru, Ann Patchett has found a way to simplify the "mechanics" of fiction, creating a realistic setting in which to explore the interaction between an unlikely cast of characters. The result is a variant of a time-honoured tradition: the mismatched group of people locked away together in an isolated country house.

Bel Canto is set in a tiny, poverty-stricken, unnamed Latin American country which (unsurprisingly) has a local-born Japanese president. This "host country" (as it is referred to) invites an American diva, Roxanne Coss, to come and sing at a soirée hosted by the vice president. The aim is to lure a potential investor, a Japanese businessman called Katsumi Hosokawa--an opera fanatic who adores Coss's voice--to visit. A group of rebels storms the residence, intending to capture the president, but when they find that he is not there (he is at home watching his favourite soap opera), they are forced to take hostages. Among the colourful, multinational group captured are the diva; the besotted Mr Hosokawa; the amiable vice president; and Gen, Mr Hosokawa's polyglot interpreter, through whose eyes much of the drama unfolds. Gen's facility for languages means that he becomes the conduit for communication between the rebels and the hostages, a Red Cross negotiator and the rebels, and even between the hostages themselves.

As in the siege of the Japanese embassy in Peru, the crisis drags on for months without loss of life, and slowly the barriers between captors and hostages break down. The diva decides that she must continue to exercise her voice. Sheet music is brought in from the outside world (all of the diva's demands, unlike the rebels', are met), and each morning all in the house, rebels and hostages alike, listen to her sing. Bel Canto is in part about how we interact outside the borders of language and culture, and for the hostages, music becomes the main means of communication, the diva the icon they worship.

For many of the hostages, the siege is a time of great happiness, captivity liberating them from their normal lives. The vice president finds that he has a real talent for housekeeping, Mr Hosokawa finds love in the arms of his diva, and Gen exchanges

lessons in Spanish for lessons in love with one of the rebels, who is fittingly named Carmen. This development of the characters, the way in which each deals with the situation, is charmingly, often humorously portrayed in a narrative that moves effortlessly between the protagonists.

Apart from the generals who lead them, the rebels are little more than children, unsophisticated, amazed to find themselves in a dreamlike palace. They delight in trying on the vice president's clothes, and watching television. Bonds are formed--Roxanne begins to teach one boy to sing, the vice president promises to adopt another as his son "when this is all over"--but the fate of the rebels is preordained, and the looming tragedy is underlined in the novel not only by its similarities to the 1997 crisis, but equally through its references to opera. This makes the violent conclusion no less shocking.

A somewhat puzzling epilogue aims at creating symmetry--or simply a happy ending for two of the hostages--but seems rather to lessen the impact of the climactic scene inside the residence. Bel Canto explores how quickly we adapt to new surroundings and make them our own, our capacity for change, how each of us may have depths and strengths that remain untapped except in times of crisis. The novel plays with the characters' perceptions of reality--yet it is both deliberately surreal and at the same time dependent upon a real-life event, perhaps in order to allow the reader to accept its narrative framework. Ultimately, something about this marrying of the real and the fantastical jars, as though the obvious reference to the real is too heavy a burden for such a delicate exploration of ideas.