Bel Canto

Rating:
Summary: power of music???
Review: I love romantic stories with detailed fine writings. However, this book really disappointed me. This was fully convinced that the main idea of this book was that imprisonment turned everyone into stupidity and insanity. 4 and half months, if I remember it correctly, they had 4 and half months to negotiate... if only one of them still had his mind! Even the one who was deeply in love with his wide did nothing???? Isn't this funny, when the Red Cross guy saw the hopelessness of the situation, the VP saw nothing. The VP wanted to adopt the terrorist, which showed his looking forward to the future but did nothing besides entertaining his guests. He should be the one who understood those hostage stories. After all, he is the vice president of the country. Highly amazing, isn't it? The ending was even more amazing... Gen married the soprano???? For what??? Gen said he could not live without music any more... Anyway, I was totally confused... Either the characters were too stupid for me to understand them, or something wrong with me that I could not understand the "power of music". (If the music has power to turn everyone into "insane" dreamer, I would rather I never understand it).

Rating:
Summary: Excellent read
Review: It was so easy to become part of this book and feel everything the characters do.

This was one of the best books I've read all year and I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: O Brother
Review: I'm making a list of the works of fiction that are about the redemptive power of music. On it so far are two novels, Bel Canto and Cold Mountain, and two movies, O Brother Where Art Thou and The Song-Catcher. Wait! Think about it! O Brother is supposedly a hillbilly retelling of the Odyssesy, but really it's music that saves the characters. Same thing in Cold Mountain. In Song-Catcher it's obvious.
It's also obvious in Bel Canto. Music is the elixir that turns enemies into lovers, brutes into poets, and a terrifying situation into the most wonderful thing that has ever happened, even to people who have led lives surrounded by comfort and beauty.


Rating:
Summary: something other than the plot
Review: all i have to say is that the people who rated this any less than 4 stars do not know what they are talking about. fact is, this book was incredibly written. I am not going to write anymore aobut the plot because clearly in the fisrt 421 posts it has been said. i don't even think this book deserves any less than 5 stars. incredible book. look into the meaning of bel canto, also what the operas that she speaks about in the book..they all relate to what is happening. i read somewhere that somebody had written that "this just isn't true." Clearly, it is a work of fiction; it is abstract. One who cannot understand fiction is one who cannot understand the content of this book. read this book with a mind that is more open than it has ever been and look deep into it becuase there is a lot of symbolism and parallels. bon voyage.

Rating:
Summary: wonderful
Review: I loved this book. The relationships that are forged between the kidnapped victims are amazing. Certain scenes in this book seemed to slow down, and each word within these scenes is beautiful and entrancing. This would have been my favorite book of the year if not for the last two pages, which I found to be unbelievable.

Rating:
Summary: Freedom in captivity
Review: This book, with the unlikely juxtaposition of opera and terrorists, is an opera in itself. Patchett captures in language the feeling of opera -- she captures the stage and the fluidity of movement from one moment to the next. But more than that, she captures a sense of freedom. The captives and the terrorists, each forced from their normal lives, finds escape in their forced captivity. From the "numbers man" turned pianist to the terrorist turned opera singer, each character is released from their everyday lives to explore the world in new terms. Yes, this is a love story, but more than that it's about the shackles and ties people place on themselves, what they do when they find themselves free of those shackles, and what happens when people are unwilling to let go of their self-imposed imprisonment.

Rating:
Summary: Rousseau's "Nobel Savage" Myth - Regurgitated
Review: Bel Canto is a romance novel about terrorists. Or should I say that it is a romance of terrorism? Patchett seems to regurgitate, in novel form, Rousseau's "noble savage" myth that all men, unfettered by society and/or civilization, are intrinsically good and that this good will shine through no matter what. Patchett's problem is Rousseau's problem:

It just isn't true.

Man is a social animal and we interact and have relationships with other people. Patchett gets the relationship part right, but the part she gets wrong is the part about habit. When a person does bad things often enough, those things often become second nature. Such a person will often kill that spark of goodness that he once possessed because he becomes so accustomed to doing evil that he no longer recognizes that what he is doing IS evil. People like Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler, and Josef Stalin, to name a few. And in the case of Shining Path, how many times can you kill someone by hacking them to death with a machete before it becomes second nature? Such a person is no longer capable of good, healthy relationships with anyone as human beings ultimately become the objects by which self-gratification is obtained.

What Patchett is portraying in the second half of the book is not exactly Stockholm syndrome - it's a bit more than that. She's trying to get the reader to see the terrorists as human beings - which they are - but she's going beyond that and trying to get us to identify with them and feel sympathy for them when they are ultimately killed at the end of the hostage crisis. She's trying to create an emotional connection which just doesn't fly - at least not for me - precisely because in order to do that, she's got to turn the terrorists into good and reasonable people.

Today's terrorists aren't good, reasonable people. Certainly not the Shining Path, the terrorist group that was involved in the incident on which this book is based. While I would feel sympathy for anyone who died in such a fashion, the emotion I would feel would be something akin to pity for the terrorists, but I would not feel that it was a great loss. I certainly would not feel grief as I would for an innocent person who had died in such a manner through no fault of their own.

Patchett has an interesting idea about weaving her tale together with music, but the music falls flat about halfway through the book. It's like she just doesn't really know how to end the novel. The real romantic ending has everyone living happily ever after. Of course, no one would buy that, so people have to die. Which is why this novel ultimately doesn't work as a romance.