Thread: Literary Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
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Old 10-26-2016, 06:47 PM   #10
AnotherCat
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I have finished this book now and spent a day or so thinking a bit about it. Its structure demanding that I found.

As I said in my earlier post I found it quite flat, it being lightly framed in a the terrorist kidnapping of the hostages where the terrorists' arrival and ending is low key (they just arrive quietly like shadows) and the climax of the ending is predictable so not much of a surprise. I sometimes wondered where it was going to, and by a little after halfway I felt it was not going to go anywhere at all.

Instead it was a third party narration in easily flowing prose of the personal interrelationships, and how those developed and ended, among the characters within a low key background of being hostages and kidnappers. I think under those circumstances the narration could very easily have become tedious, but for me it was very delicately and tenderly done; hence my earlier comment about picking the author likely being a woman, even if their name was not known.

Those characteristics were magnified by the flatness of the storyline in which, for example, the path from downstairs up the stairs to the room of the diva is as adventurous as the story gets before the end. But any significant action I think would have tarred the book's delicacy. To carry the third party narration under those circumstances was, I thought, quite artful. That perhaps, I wondered, helped by the use of Gen the interpreter in his role as a second party voiceless "narrator" or buffer to the author's narration by his "narrating" the other characters' discussions between them.

My HarperCollins version had an interesting Appendix, that being an interview of Patchett by a senior HarperCollins editor.

So to round all up, it was one of the better fiction books I have read recently. Thanks.

Last edited by AnotherCat; 10-26-2016 at 06:57 PM.
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