What is Bel Canto about?

Bel Canto opens at a birthday party in an unnamed South American country: a Japanese industrialist, Hosokawa, is celebrating in the private residence of the country's vice president, the sole attraction being a performance by his favorite soprano, Roxane Coss. When terrorists seize the building and take the guests hostage, what begins as a crisis gradually transforms into something stranger — a months-long suspension of ordinary life inside a locked compound. This is Patchett's great subject: what happens to people when normal time stops.

The novel is interested in the way extreme circumstances strip away social roles and reveal what people actually are. Hosokawa, who speaks no Spanish, falls quietly and completely in love with Roxane. A young general's aide named Gen becomes a translator for everyone and eventually falls for one of the terrorists — a girl named Carmen who has taught herself to read in the jungle. The terrorists themselves begin to lose their revolutionary certainty. The opera that Roxane sings every day becomes the organizing principle of the hostages' lives, a kind of grace that nobody earned and nobody quite understands.

Patchett's prose is precise and unhurried — she treats violence and beauty with the same level gaze. The novel never lets you forget that this cannot last, that the outside world is waiting to reassert itself. But she earns the sadness of that ending through the depth of what she builds. The Stockholm syndrome element is present but Patchett resists making it merely psychological; she's more interested in love as a fact than love as a pathology.

This is a novel that some readers find too slow, too interior, too much a meditation and not enough a story. Those who stay with it tend to love it deeply. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in 2002. Compared to Patchett's other work, it's her most lyrical and most heartbreaking — a book about the briefest possible paradise.