I finished the book. I plan to read the interview in the back over the weekend and then comment further. I'm glad I waited to read a summary of the Japanese hostage crisis. I don't remember this event in the news at the time. I can see how it loosely inspired her outline of events.
Spoiler:
I guessed that eventually the military would storm the residence and result in the deaths of the terrorists. However, I didn't guess which hostage would be caught in the middle and which hostages would get married in the final paragraphs. I thought that this summary of Patchett's creative process on Wikipedia was interesting. Probably a good call by her mentor to take out the prologue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel_Canto_(novel)
Quote:
Patchett was inspired by the Lima Crisis as she watched the events unfold on the news and thought how operatic the crisis was. Patchett was an opera novice prior to writing the book, although she has stated that the character Roxane was modeled on Karol Bennett, an acquaintance of hers who was an opera singer. Since she was not familiar with Bennett's voice, she listened to recordings by the famous American soprano Renée Fleming and imagined Roxane Coss as possessing Fleming's voice. (Patchett and Fleming became friends only after the novel was published.)
The original working title was How to Fall in Love with Opera, but her editor advised against it in case bookstores would mis-shelve it in their "how to" section. The manuscript originally contained a prologue from Gen's perspective, establishing the book as a story about how he met his wife. However, Patchett's mentor Elizabeth McCracken told her that the prologue was not needed, so Patchett cut it.
Patchett has stated that she always wanted to write with an omniscient third person narrator that "moves from person to person within a room"—a style she calls "Anna Karenina-third." Her first two novels were in first-person and her third novel was in third-person, but it was limited to one character's perspective. She was pleased when she was able to write in this style for Bel Canto, deeming her achievement of the style a progression in her writing
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