This novel is as lyrical, engaging, and wonderfully charactered as you've heard. The epilogue is also as terrible as you've heard. (You have my permission to skip it.) I have nothing to add, other than I would've loved to have seen more internal strife within the group and within the characters th...
DNF @ p.50. I just could not get invested in the story or the characters. Then I came to a point where Alex, the opera singer, performs just after the entire party has been taken hostages. I'm sorry, but I can't suspend my disbelief enough to buy that people who have just been taken hostage by a...
I was in high school when the Japanese embassy hostage crisis, the inspiration for Bel Canto, unfolded in Lima, Peru. It lasted from December 17, 1996 to April 22, 1997. I remember how it was resolved, so I knew going in that this wasn’t likely to end well for anyone. I told myself not to get attach...
Book: Bel Canto Author: Ann Patchett Genre: Fiction/Based on Real Events Summary: Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in the honor of the powerful businessman, Mr. Hosokawa. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, h...
Reading this book is like going on a date with someone who is perfectly appropriate, but not enticing. It has all the elements of a good book: The writing is beautiful, sometimes to the point where it is called magical realism (I'm not so sure about that). The keen observations on human nature are t...
That was the scenario for Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. I heard her interviewed on the Book Lust podcast last year and the host was asking Ms. Patchett questions about her latest novel, State of Wonder, when the host mentioned to the author that Bel Canto was one of her favorite novels. The host’s genu...
I was positively mesmerized by this from the first page. The story concerns an international group of party-goers gathered in a unnamed fictional South American country to hear a star opera singer, Roxane Coss, singing in honor of Katsumi Hosokawa, head of a major Japanese corporation. They're taken...
A sad, strange, beautiful book that captured my complete attention (despite the increasingly hard-to-ignore distractions that accompany being nine months pregnant). A group of well-to-do industry leaders and their wives gather at the home of a South American Vice President to celebrate the birthd...
Based on the events of a real-life situation in Peruvian embassy, Bel Canto is a fictional account of the events that transpire during a hostage crisis, after a terrorist organization takes hundreds captive while the celebrate the birthday of a Japanese industrialist. This unnamed South American na...
Mr. Hosokawa is being thrown a birthday party by government officials and other muckity-mucks in South America. The true purpose of the party for the government is to persuade Hosokawa into building a factory in their poor nation. Mr. Hosokawa, on the other hand, has absolutely no interest in doin...
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