BEL CANTO: Chapter Ten, the Epilogue, and the Novel as a Whole

[Melissa_W Moderator]

Please use this thread for discussion of Bel Canto in its entirety.  Please remember this is a SPOILER FRIENDLY thread

[Peppermill]

A search on Ann Patchett's Bel Canto yielded this:

Bel Canto' moves from page to stage; Novel inspires composer's work for string quartet

The Boston Globe Mar 13, 2010

"The Cypress String Quartet premiered 'Bel Canto' in San Francisco last month. The group gives the first East Coast performance on Wednesday at Wellesley College. The piece was composed by Elena Ruehr of Brookline."

[Peppermill]

Elaine Matsush*ta. Chicago Tribune. Chicago, Ill.: Oct 21, 2007. pg. 9

"...But neat does not mean sterile, we learned as Patchett gave us a virtual tour of the five-bedroom brick home she shares with her husband, Dr. Karl VanDevender -- and Rose, her 12-year-old white terrier mix. Take the writer's pale blue study, for example, where there is plenty of warmth tucked inside its four blue walls. A simple and beautiful Thos. Moser desk (a gift Patchett gave herself after she sold her fourth book,' Bel Canto') sits in front of windows that look out onto her back yard. A yellow toile couch ('where I take a lot of naps') sits invitingly at the ready."

[Peppermill]

"Ann Patchett's tale of a terrorist siege at a lavish South American party and the unusual relationships that emerge won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award, the richest annual U.S. literary prize, the writers' organization announced ....

"Patchett's Bel Canto  beat out National Book Award winner Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections, Karen Joy Fowler's Sister Noon, Claire Messud's The Hunters, and Manil Suri's The Death of Vishnu.

.....

"Judges David Guterson, Jane Hamilton and Sylvia Watanabe reviewed 325 novels and short story collections from 85 publishing houses."

This despite many of the original reviews having been lukewarm at best, several not reacting at all favorably to Patchett's lightening of a story of terror.

[IBIS]

From beginning to end, “Bel Canto” moves at a snail-like pace as a kind of hallucination...  a dreamlike fable that takes place out of real time... and out of real space.

"We have done away with time," one guest tells the others, as he takes off his expensive watch.

In the beginning, to introduce the dreamlike atmosphere, Roxane sings an aria from Dvorák's mermaid “Rusalka”. She falls in love with a human prince. She has to choose her fate… if she chooses to become mortal, she will lose her power of speech. She will become a spirit of death. 

The opera takes place on the cusp between spring and summer. “Bel Canto” takes place during the drizzly, misty days of the garua when time has no meaning.

The vice-presidental palace is surrounded by a thick mist that cuts the inhabitants off from the outside world. When the garua lifts, so does Roxane's beautiful singing... and the novel ends. 

[Peppermill]

In your opinion, why do Gen and Roxane end up together?

Somehow, deep as it was, the experience seemed to be more one to move away from than one to entomb in a living relationship.

I could understand memories, I could understand revisiting it, I could understand reunions, but day-in and day-out? Healthy?

[Peppermill]

Spoke at fair length last night with a friend who read Bel Canto for discussion with a reading group a year ago last January or February.  She absolutely loved the novel.  One of the things she mentioned was the use of music as a common language. 

This friend is a singer, and she said that things Roxanne does were things she tries to do herself with her own singing.

One of the characters that really appealed to her was the Russian.  Another was the boy who took singing lessons.

She felt a sense of devastation by the carnage of the ending and kept wanting it to end differently.

More another time.

Papper

[foxycat]

I don't understand the epilogue at all. Earlier in the novel it's stated that Gen and Roxane are NOT in love.

[Peppermill]

---

foxycat wrote:

I don't understand the epilogue at all. Earlier in the novel it's stated that Gen and Roxane are NOT in love.

---

My friend who loved the novel has promised me another conversation on the subject of Roxane and Gen, a development that also mystified me.

For the moment, my only comment is that they seem to have created a mutual existence based on shared experience and  shared love, but shared love towards Hosokowa.

[Peppermill]

Rusalka

"The opera Rusalka symbolizes the fear that deep love will end in terrible suffering. Rusalka, which is the centerpiece of Coss’s repertoire, is about a water goddess who wants to love a human prince. She has a witch give her human form, but the transformation comes with a curse: when her human lover is untrue, her embrace becomes deadly. The goddess’s lover repents for straying and begs for her love. At the end of the opera, the goddess and the lover embrace, knowing that that embrace will kill the lover."

Ibis -- is the above accurate for Rusalka?   I don't know this opera and have done no further homework than your note and this entry from SparkNotes.

(Here are two somewhat conflicting links:

Wikipedia Rusalka -- note reference to CD by Renée Fleming

Britannica Rusalka)

Sounds like perhaps two operas, but that the sources of the liberetto differ confuses me.  I fell in love with the writing of Pushkin when we read Eugene Onegin on the Epics Board.

"Song to the Moon" by Renée Fleming from Rusalka

This opens with the feel of the haze surrounding the hostages.

---

IBIS wrote [excerpt]:

In the beginning, to introduce the dreamlike atmosphere, Roxane sings an aria from Dvorák's mermaid “Rusalka”. She falls in love with a human prince. She has to choose her fate… if she chooses to become mortal, she will lose her power of speech. She will become a spirit of death. 

The opera takes place on the cusp between spring and summer. “Bel Canto” takes place during the drizzly, misty days of the garua when time has no meaning.

---

[foxycat]

 I attended a rehearsal of Rusalka at the Met about 15 years ago,  possibly with Benackova. Because it was not a regular performance, it's the only one for which I have no Stagebill.

The original Erben poem 'The Water Goblin," or "Water Sprite," is also the basis of one of Dvorak's symphonic poem series portraying four Czech myths.  I just pulled out the recordings of these 4 smaller pieces as we speak. I didn't make the connection between "The Water Goblin," and Rusalka until just now, although I've had this tape for years.

It would be unlikely that any non-Slavic soprano would make Rusalka the center of her repertoire, so this is one of Patchett's literary liberties.

[foxycat]

Aside from my own books, this is where I usually go opera info, but not much on Dvorak's opera here:

http://opera.stanford.edu/main.html

[chadadanielleKR]

Thanks Ibis & Pepper, knowing this makes the reading much more enjoyable. I hardly knew anything related to opera singing....but with internet, one video leading to another, it is so easy to discover new

voices, new parts and spending hours listening to all this!

[foxycat]

Is Patchett mixing her metaphors? At first Roxane represents love, hope, beauty, life, then like Rusalka, her very deep love brings tragedy and death? Maybe WE are carrying the metaphor too far, as it was NOT her love that brought disaster.

[Peppermill]

---

foxycat wrote:

...It would be unlikely that any non-Slavic soprano would make Rusalka the center of her repertoire, so this is one of Patchett's literary liberties.

---

p 164.  Gen comments that Roxanne does not know Czech; he recognizes that she had memorized the work phonetically.

Among the Youtube versions, someone (was it Ibis or someone commenting on Youtube, I don't find it now?) comments that they prefer this version by Frederica Von Stade to that of Renee Fleming.   Biography.

p.152.  Here is Maria Callas singing "O Mio Babbino Caro" from Puccini's Gianni Schicchi.

Not clear to me why Patchett chose this particular aria here.

p. 162 Another place where Patchett's allusions and layered meanings, if any, are not clear to me: "She was Mozart's Susanna.  Carmen was the Countess Rosina."

These are clearly roles from the Marriage of Figaro, but I haven't grasped the parallels.

[foxycat]

That clip of Von Stade in her prime was a breath of fresh air. Thank you.   Were you in the BSO at that time, IBIS?

I had also marked the reference to Rosina and Susanna.  Might it be sign of Roxane's new humility? She's feels as if they were "sisters, girlfriends, the same" and they brushed each other's hair into identical braids. The servants in both Figaro and The Barber of Seville overstep their roles.

The bedroom-switching that takes place in Chapter 8 could be something out of Rossini or a Mozart comedy as well, with Beatriz brought into the circle of plotters.

[foxycat]

I've been busy tonight watching Fleming in Der Rosenkavalier on PBS. Thrilling!

[Melissa_W Moderator]

I am jealous!    I first heard/saw Renee Fleming in a Met broadcast of Don Giovanni (Bryn Terfel) and Fleming was Donna Anna - amazing!

---

foxycat wrote:

I've been busy tonight watching Fleming in Der Rosenkavalier on PBS. Thrilling!

---

[Peppermill]

As I stated above in the Chapter 7-9 thread, I finished re-reading Bel Canto this morning.

The imagination and the structural genius of Patchett strikes me so much as I have encountered this novel a second time. The first time it seemed more like a fanciful sweet tragic story.

But, I still say it would have been exceedingly difficult to write, at least with so little political overlay, after 9/11.  I try to imagine what creating the humanity of the terrorists would have been like, although even in Bel Canto, Patchett distinguishes between two groups. (Has anyone read real-life or fictional stories that have done that for al Qaeda or Palestinian terrorists?)

"...In one shot he lost both his life and the life of his brother, Luis, who would soon be taken from prison and executed for conspiracy." p. 311.    (p. 22 had first brought Gen. Benjamin sympathy for his raging shingles.  Later, we learn he had been a schoolteacher before his brother was detained.  We saw his pride in the young terrorists he could have imagined as his pupils.)

I may still need to read the last two pages again and consider the transition into the epilogue.  The invasion comes so suddenly and so violently -- which is probably realistic, like the original take-over on the first pages.  But, as a reader, I don't know quite what to do with it, how to register it, especially with the turn of events in the lives of Gen and Roxanne.

[Peppermill]

The Name Ishmael

When I encountered "Ishmael" as a name again in August's Return of the Native (Classics Board), I went looking for some background information.

I don't know that what I found is particularly helpful in understanding Patchett's selection of the name in Bel Canto, but here are some tidbits from Wikipedia:

"his descendants would live in hostility with all his brothers"

"It is translated literally as 'God has hearkened', suggesting that 'a child so named was regarded as the fulfillment of a divine promise.'"

"Upon hearing the Lord's blessing for Isaac, Abraham pleaded with the Lord that Ishmael also be given a blessing."

"The  Bahá'í writings state that it was Ishmael, and not Isaac, who was the son that Abraham almost sacrificed.   However, the Bahá'í writings also state that the name is unimportant as either could be used: the importance is that both were symbols of sacrifice."

One can make some conjectures about why "Ishmael" for the little helpful terrorist that Ruben hoped to adopt as "big brother" for his son -- but I don't have any idea whether any of them were on Patchett's mind.