Bel Canto Book Report Hannah

Hannah Greene
Bel Canto Review

For my holiday reading assignment, I chose to read the novel Bel Canto by Ann Patchett.  Ann Patchett is an American author who has received the Orange Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2002 for her novel Bel Canto. Some of her other work includes the books State of Wonder and the Magician’s assistant.  What she is most famous for, Bel Canto, is a novel I found to be well written and does not fall short of it’s award winning status. 

Bel Canto is a story with love, friendship, and extraordinary growth of relationships.  Somewhere is South America, in the home of the country’s vice president, a wonderful birthday party is held for the successful businessman Mr. Hosokawa.  The highlight of the party is the entertainment of opera singer Roxanne Cross, who mesmerizes all of the guests with her beautiful, soprano voice.  

        It is Patchett’s way with words and beautiful description of Hosokawa’s love and passion towards music that immediately hooks us to the novel.  “Such love breeds loyalty, and Mr. Hosokawa was a loyal man.  He never forgot the importance of Verdi in his life.  He became attached to certain singers, as everyone does.  He made special connections…”  

The plot thickens right away when a band of armed terrorists take the entire party hostage.  However, through the progression of the novel what began as panic evolves into something quite different.  

The beauty does not seem to cease in Patchett’s writing as she enters the idea of love exceeding all obstacles.  I, being a complete sucker for mushy romantics, found the novel to be amazingly intriguing.  
Terrorists and Hostages form unexpected bonds.  Friendship and love lead the characters to forget about the real danger that has been set in motion and it cannot be stopped.  

Bel Canto is written through the third person omniscient view. It is Patchett’s art with handling each and every sentence that hooked me immediately and did not for a minute fail to bore me.  Every word placement and the tone of the book creates a passage way to enter into the novel as if you were living in it.  The story contains loaded imagery to make an experience such as a movie playing in your head.  Ann Patchett’s writing style enchants the reader making them part of the story. rather than looking at boring crinkled pages.  It only makes me want to read more of her stories because of her beautiful style.  
The novel not only entertains but educates the reader.  It opens one’s perspective on personal life.  “It makes you wonder.  All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”  “Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it...It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world’s greatest soprano.  Not everyone can be the artist.  There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see.”  Patchett makes the reader wonder, placing a new sort of view and value on life itself.  
At the end of the novel we are faced with true love in every sense of the word.  The beauty of falling in love, romance, and sacrifices reach every emotion of the reader making a clear and impactful statement.  A statement of gratefulness, gratitude, and the significant value of every tiny thing on planet earth.  But above all, Bel Canto teaches the amazing, complex, and beautiful thing we call love. I give this book my full recommendation in hopes that everyone should be educated by the beauty, simplicity, and love of and in the world.