The critically reviewed novel opens with the kidnapping of a Japanese CEO, Mr. Hosokawa, and his sidekick-translator, Gen, while on a trip to an unnamed South American country for a lavish birthday party in Hosokawa’s honor at which Roxane Coss, a famous American opera diva, is entertaining the guests. Though an unlikely setting for a sublime novel which, at its core, reminds us what it is that makes us human, Bel Canto is all that--and more. It is also a story about language, culture, struggle, love and music, an exploration of what divides us, and most importantly, what unites us. To set a novel in a hostage situation is a bold move, but to render from that dramatic situation a moving exploration of how it is possible for people to find ways of communicating, not only across linguistic but also cultural and political divisions, is nothing short of miraculous. The theatricality and dramatic intensity of the story itself, with its pairings of opposites in two love stories; the confusions of sexual identities; and the transformation of what at first seems to be a hellish imprisonment into a kind of paradise, are all wonderfully realized. Not only does the novel engender in the reader the very passion for art and the language of music, but the reader will find him or herself fervently wanting the magical awakenings and love affairs to continue forever, even though you know that the violence of the real world must and will intrude.
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Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett was born in Los Angeles in 1963 and raised in Nashville. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1990, she won a residential fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars. It was named a New York Times Notable Book for 1992. In 1993, she received a Bunting Fellowship from the Mary Ingrahm Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. Patchett's second novel, Taft, was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best work of fiction in 1994. Her third novel, The Magician's Assistant, was short-listed for England's Orange Prize and earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her next novel, Bel Canto, won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in 2002, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was named the Book Sense Book of the Year. It sold over a million copies in the United States and has been translated into thirty languages. In 2004, Patchett published Truth & Beauty, a memoir of her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy. It was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Entertainment Weekly. Truth & Beauty was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Alex Award from the American Library Association. She was the editor for Best American Short Stories 2006. Patchett has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Gourmet, and Vogue. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband, Karl VanDevender.
53 Livros
36 Seguidores
California, EUA