Book Club: Bel Canto

So this week, I read Bel Canto. In an effort to be fully disclosing, a dear friend works as Ann Patchett’s Gal Friday. Probably the only reason this is relevant is that I bought Bel Canto solely because I wanted to read something of length by Niki’s boss.

No one really seemed that upset when I didn't take a picture of my copy last week, so I think we're just going to roll with the Good Reads image from now on.

No one really seemed that upset when I didn’t take a picture of my copy last week, so I think we’re just going to roll with the Good Reads image from now on.

I’ve really liked Ann Patchett’s work since I read an essay she wrote for Vogue about her friend and fellow writer Lucy Grealy. I tried in vain to find that essay and link it here, but suffice to say, it left its mark on me ten or so years ago and I remember it clearly, if not fondly (it’s not a happy essay). My mom read Bel Canto about the same time, I dismiss doing the same because I was 15 and things my mom liked were extremely uncool. I have since revisited this position and am happy to report I have read this book in its entirety!

The basic premise of the novel is that it is that a poor Latin American country has a birthday party for a wealthy Japanese businessman in hopes his company will build a plant of some stripe in their capital city. They invite a lot of dignitaries, and pay a very famous soprano to sing for guests. Things are going pretty well until a terrorist group breaks in through the air vents and holds everyone hostage. Despite the best efforts of the Red Cross, et al, the standoff lasts…a really long time. How long? Hard to say. Months, I think. Patchett never really says for sure, but it’s a really. long. time. A long time. Forever.

Without giving away a ton of plot points (because it’s well-paced and the character development is great), things get kind of weird! Several people fall in love with the aforementioned soporano, Roxane Coss. She falls in love in return, either once or twice, depending on how you count it. Mr. Hosokawa, the gentleman for whom this party is held, comes out of his shell. The Frenchman teaches the terrorists to cook! The vice president of the unnamed nation decides to adopt one of the hostage takers! You get the idea. Finally, everyone gets to go home, which is, I suppose, a foregone conclusion in nearly any given hostage situation.

I love how well Patchett captures the feeling of waiting for the main event to start, and how relationships build and crumble in unpleasant situations. The whole book is a study in waiting, in passing time. It’s months that the hostages are inside the vice presidential mansion, awaiting…something. By the time they’re finally rescued, the reader has worked out a way they could continue on like this indefinitely- the soprano singing, the Russians playing cards, the hostage takers watching soccer on the television, the commanding general playing chess in his stolen study.

The hostages become attached to their captors, who are, as it is revealed, really just kids taken from a remote village and given guns. Since Roxane is the only woman, she becomes incredibly beautiful to the others (I have long called this proximity hotness and I was a beneficiary of this principle on the national quiz bowl circuit long ago [more on this another time]). Everyone, it seems, confesses their undying love to her at some point or another, and she’s really dignified about that, like it happens all the time. By the last pages of the book, everyone is so intertwined with each other, you can’t imagine how they’re going to function outside in their normal lives.

I have just two criticisms of this book, and one is pretty minor. Since it’s a big ole cast of characters (some 60 or so named folks), sometimes they get grouped by national stereotypes that make me a little uncomfortable (the French guy has a scarf and cries often, the Russians are loud talkers, the Japanese are very uncomfortable often). The other is about the epilogue, but that’s for you to make your own mind up about. To me, it felt really confusing- I couldn’t make the logical jump to how the characters wrapped up there and so soon after.

Overall, Patchett has such command over narrative pacing and the English language more broadly, so I can’t recommend this book enough for people who like literary fiction but wish something would happen, damn it. There are guns and SWAT teams and stuff, but also operas. How can you lose? You can’t lose.

Next week, I’m reading this, and I hope you’ll join me! I read it on two short plane rides, so you have no excuse to not be part of my special club.

Okay, so tell me: what did you think of Bel Canto? Am I off-base about the epilogue? What did you love best? Got a favorite character? You have about a million to pick from.

Lazy Sunday: 15 December 2013

We’re careening wildly toward Christmas, so here are some non-shopping-related links for you.

  • “Mistakes were made” has its own Wikipedia page.
  • A long read about the over-diagnosis of ADD/ADHD and how we got here. Fun fact: when I took the little quiz at the bottom, it said I probably have ADD, and so do about 50-60% of Americans!
  • The Onion gets just a step too close to home again.
  • I don’t know a ton about how spam comments work (other than the fact that I get a lot of them here), but The Awl figured it out, and explained it in terms I mostly understood!
  • Regardless of how you feel about eating meat, eggs, and dairy (things I eat!), read this article about factory farming.
  • Here’s a sweet video of a leopard and a baboon that doesn’t start out so great, but is pretty darn cute.
  • I had been following the Robert Levinson story for awhile, so I don’t know why it never occurred to me that he was involved in an off-book CIA mission. I sincerely thought that only happened on Covert Affairs.

Lazy Sunday, 1 December 2013

I’m still nursing a tryptophan hangover, so you’ll have to fend for yourselves.

  • URGENT MATTER OF NATIONAL IMPORT: Watch this before it goes away because of copyrighty nonsense and ruins all my fun.
  • Actually, Thanksgiving food does taste better, according to Science.
  • I knew someone in college who was really, really into lucid dreaming and he was always pressing books on me and trying to talk quietly to me until I fell asleep/was asleep and explaining how to take control of my astral plains or whatever and maybe he was on to something.
  • Lettering does not equal type, and here are the distinctions. (This is very interesting, contrary to the way I set it up.)
  • I was completely and utterly hooked after the first line of this excellent article about the international art dealing community.
  • Albert Camus killed JFK.
  • Almost everyone my age who is interested in food credits Alton Brown of Good Eats with feeding that kernel of curiosity in the late 90s/early 00s. He didn’t have the stupid construct that I was following along (wasn’t allowed to use stove) or that I could buy expensive ingredients (couldn’t earn money because childhood), and instead focused on teaching you how things worked, and this is what made him so great.
  • Paul Walker died last night, and this is a mediation on fame, masculine beauty in the extreme, and dying young. If you were born between 1985-1992 and you say that Paul Walker + Usher were not completely formative in your understanding of your own sexuality, you’re a liar and I want you to stop reading Chronderlust.
  • Quick reminder: The internet is not anonymous and you are not so smart, even you, Miss OBGYN Smartypants/Drug Dealer.
  • I can’t bring myself to click this, since I’m already afraid of EVERYTHING, but maybe you will want to. Even the lead up is creepy. I need to lie down.
Link

Leftovers

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s got your turkey recipes riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight here.

Video

It’s a Coke. For the last time, a Coke.

Did you take that crazy, now-closed dialect quiz from N.C. State a couple weeks back? Cool, me, too. I sound how you probably think I do. Here’s a video of that data, visualized beautifully.

Book Club: Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

I’ve been trying to fall in love for awhile now. There have been a lot of false starts (sorry, Marcel Proust) and unfulfilled promises (I’m coming for you, too, Fun House) and disingenuous-but-attractive stand-ins for the real thing (Swamplandia!). I just haven’t read anything that I love in awhile. I thought it was different with Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, but I was wrong.

It started, as it so often does, in a bar.

It started, as it so often does, in a bar.

The premise of the book is strong and sounds just like something I’d love: a modern fable, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore features an out-of-work Silicon Valley designer, Clay, who takes a job at a mysterious bookstore to make ends meet. There’s more to it than he initially suspects, and he starts to delve into the mysteries contained within. A Googler, the titular shopkeeper, and a start-up success story join up with our hero Clay on his quest to find answers. We get a little bit of typographical history, half of a love story, and a geeky backlog of affection for the sci-fi novels of the 80s. I don’t want to give a lot away, so I’m going to stop here on plot summary. Suffice to say, the setup is clever: you get some self-conscious winks toward Never-Ending Story structure,and a couple biting asides about start-up culture, and then you’re off.

My litany of woe begins thus: there’s a tech solution to every problem our hero faces. In a book that was sold to me as a love letter to the written word, I feel like it leaned on the god from the machine, if you will. Reading it produced the same sensation you get when you watch CSI:Miami. “That’s not how computers work,” you say. “Scanners don’t do that. You can’t make pixels.” This was like that. A lot like that. For a long time. In contemporary literature, technology is sort of like its own character, but you have to shape it carefully or it becomes a golem, no longer willing to do your bidding. Robin Sloane did a good job talking about cell phones and laptops in a way that won’t feel immediately dated (hello, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), but he let them do too much, and soon they were running around, terrorizing me.

As much as technology was a developed character, most of the others were not. Clay’s maybe-girlfriend, Kat, feels like a plot device more than a person, a handy doorkeeper to Google. Oliver, another employee at Mr. Penumbra’s eponymous shop, has a small cast of satellite characters that attend to his grad student universe; I never even caught their names. Roommates are given unnecessary subplots that are never revisited, and I didn’t care if they were or not. Clay and Neel, his childhood best friend, were likeable enough that I wanted them to succeed, I guess, but I didn’t feel that strongly about it one way or the other. The person I cared the most about was Aldus Mantius, a long-dead Italian typographer of yore: his designs look like a tattoo I’d love to have, and the accompanying message, festina lente, is something that I tacked up on my board at work. Mantius, though, is a specter, and doesn’t have any dialogue, for obvious reasons. Sloane gets so deep into his role as fabulist that he forgets himself; everyone feels like a symbol or a stock character, and no one ends up being that compelling.

I’m done maligning now. I wanted to love this too much, and that was probably my own undoing. The first hundred pages were so fresh, so clever, that I didn’t do the necessary background check. It was just too good to be true, and the undergirding structures couldn’t hold the weight of the narrative.

Next week, I’ll be reading this. Let me know if you want to join!

Have you read Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore? What did you think? Am I completely off base? Not even in the ballpark? Let me have it.

Video

Reminder: You’ve never done anything original.

Have a great week, everyone.