Ann Patchett – Bel Canto

Patchett, Ann. Bel Canto.

Knew the sweetness had to end, all of the loves sustained within a single swell, like the vibrato of an opera singer’s note

All helpless to systems

How does she make all of these characters? Simon who fell in love with his wife in this country and sobs, in her blue scarf. The peppermint detail.

The moments: when the Russian confesses his love for her for no reason in return but to do it.

What of the mess of Mr. Hosokawa’s wife, whom he cheated on? Admitted he didn’t really care for? His daughter (like the one who got him that recording of Roxanne to start)? But it’s okay… not ignored or infantilized or fantasized (if so they would not have been mentioned in the first place) but not a sin, either.

This book is also about art and imagining a scenario in which it is literally the most important thing in the world.

The characters. The gross Beatriz.

10/25/20: I just love the tone of this book. The tenderness.

• (6) “ Was his mind so full of her that in the very instant of darkness he reached for her, did he think so quickly? Or was it that they wanted her too, all of the men and women in the room, and so they imagined it collectively. They were so taken by the beauty of her voice that they wanted to cover her mouth with their mouth, drink in. Maybe music could be transferred, devoured, owned. What would it mean to kiss the lips that had held such a sound?”
• (8) “The room was filled with the pleasant smell of candles just snuffed, a smoke that was sweet and wholly unthreatening.”
• “blackhearted poppies”
• (9) “sugared with promise”
• (10) “It was October 22 and so it was a cold autumn rain and the streets were waxed in a paper-thin layer of wet red leaves. 
• “They were early, but other people were earlier, as part of the luxury that came with the ticket price was the right to sit quietly in this beautiful place and wait.”
• (11) “Such love breeds loyalty, and Mr. Hosokawa was a loyal man. He never forgot the importance of Verdi in his life. He became attached to certain singers, as everyone does. He made special collections of Schwarzkopf and Sutherland. He believed in the genius of Callas above all others.”
• (12) Handel, Alcina
• (13) “The music praised her. Mr. Hosokawa closed his eyes. He dreamed.”
• La Sonambula
• (14) “drunk from liquor and pork and Dvořák.”
• (24) “ Mr. Hosokawa heard something in this young man’s voice, something familiar and soothing. It was not a musical voice, and yet it affected him like music. Speak again.”
• (25) ““And your family, are they still there?” Gen Watanabe paused for a moment as if he were remembering. A swarm of Australian teenagers passed them, each with a knap- sack strapped to her back. Their shouts and laughter filled the concourse. “Wombat!” one girl cried out, and the others answered, “Wombat! Wombat! Wombat!” They stumbled in their laughter and clung to each other’s arms. “They are all there,” Gen said, eyeing the backs of the teenagers with cautious suspicion.”
  • • good
• (29) ““Lies,” the man with the gun corrected.”
• “The man with the gun looked at the Vice President on the floor and then, as if liking the sight of him there, instructed the rest of the party to lie down. For those who didn’t speak the language this was clear enough, as one by one the other guests sank to their knees and then stretched out on the floor. “Faceup,” he added. The few who had done it wrong rolled over now.”
  • • funny!
• (30) “Bit by bit the accompanist was moving on top of her, trying to bury her beneath his own broad back.” 
• (32) “One boy took a peppermint from a woman’s satin evening clutch but first held it up discreetly for consent. She moved her head down and back, just a quarter of an inch, and he smiled and slipped off the cellophane.”
• (36) “bitterness being the first cousin to truth.”
• (37) “ The sound was nagging and accusatory. It was nothing, nothing like song.”
• (38) “There were a series of loud clicks and then an artificial blue-white light spilled through the living-room window like cold milk and made everyone squint.” 
• (46) “In Paris, Simon Thibault had loved his wife, though not always faithfully or with a great deal of attention. They had been married for twenty-five years. There had been two children, a summer month spent every year at the sea with friends, various jobs, various family dogs, large family Christmases that included many elderly relatives. Edith Thibault was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women that often over the course of years he forgot about her. Entire days would pass when she never once crossed his mind. He did not stop to think what she might be doing or wonder if she was happy, at least not Edith by herself, Edith as his wife. Then, in a wave of government promises made and retracted, they were sent to this country, which, between the two them was always referred to as ce pays maudit, “this godforsaken country.” Both of them faced the appointment with dread and stoic practicality, but within a matter of days after their arrival a most remarkable thing happened: he found her again, like something he never knew was missing, like a song he had memorized in his youth and had then forgotten. Suddenly, clearly, he could see her, the way he had been able to see her at twenty, not her physical self at twenty, because in every sense she was more beautiful to him now, but he felt that old sensation, the leaping of his heart, the reckless flush of desire. He would find her in the house, cutting fresh paper to line the shelves or lying across their bed on her stomach writing letters to their daughters who were ways been like this, had he never known? Had he known and then somehow, carelessly, forgotten? In this country with its dirt roads and yellow rice he discovered he loved her, he was her. Perhaps this would not have been true if he had been the ambassador to Spain.”
• (63) “There was no putting one’s finger on it exactly, but it was as if there would be no point in shooting Messner. He seemed like someone who had been shot every day of his life and had simply had enough of it.”
• “It seemed to him the perfect coincidence. She is singing Gilda and he is still a boy with his father in Tokyo.”
• In the audience of her singing: “He is anonymous, equal, loved.”
• (81) ““Thank you,” she said.
  “Thank you,” he repeated.
  “You’ll look after him?” At this point the accompanist raised his head and took some of his weight onto his own feet.
  “Thank you,” Mr. Hosokawa repeated tenderly.”
• (82) “She took off the light silk wrapper she was wearing. He had forgotten to ask for it. It was a wonderful blue, the blue used on the dinner plates of kings and the underbreasts of the birds in this very godforsaken jungle.”
• (89) “Three things happened in close succession: first, Roxane Coss, lyric soprano, made a clear, high-pitched sound that came from what appeared to be some combination of surprise and actual pain as the tug caused her neck to snap backwards; second, every guest invited to the party (with the exception of her accom- panist) stepped forward, making it clear that this was the moment for insurrection; third, every terrorist, ranging from the ages of fourteen to forty-one, cocked the weapon he had been holding and the great metallic click stilled them all like a film spliced into one single frame.”
• “And then one of them said in a voice that was low and confused, “She could sing.” With their heads together there was no telling who said it. It may well have been all of them, all of us.”
• (89) “The terrorists, having no chance to get what they came for, decided to take something else instead, something that they never in their lives knew that they wanted until they crouched in the low, dark shaft of the air-conditioning vents: opera.”
• (91) ““Take me instead,” the accompanist howled, his knees swaying dangerously towards another buckle. It was a delightfully old- fashioned offer, though every person in the room knew that no one wanted him and everyone wanted her.”
• “To die because an underskilled terrorist had poor aim was hardly how she had meant to go.”
• (95) “He had very little experience being rude to priests and he needed the cigarette as a prop.”
• (98) ““He was a very good pianist,” she said. She wanted to join in, but frankly, no longer remembered the prayers. She added, “He was punctual.””
  • she doesn’t really know him
• (104) ‘It should not be Gen’s responsibility, deciding what was best for her, what to tell and what not to tell. He did not know her. He did not know how she would take such a thing. But then she grabbed his ankle in the same way a standing person might have grabbed a wrist in an argument. He looked down at this famous hand touching his pant’s leg and felt confused. “English!” she said.”
• (105) “All of you go back,” General Benjamin said, not wanting to watch another touching exchange.”
• (106) “Warfare should not include cellular phones, it made everything seem less serious.”
• (107) “The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.”
• (110) ““We came up through the air-conditioning vents,” General Benjamin said, and then after a pause he added a descriptive phrase. “Like moles.””
• (111) This book it’s also about multiple captivating, of a large audience. Opera, esmeralda
• (113) “ Never in a lifetime would Gen have come to her on his own. Never would he find the courage to express his own sympathies and remorse, in the same way that Mr. Hosokawa would not have the courage to speak to her even if his English had been perfect. But together they moved through the world quite easily, two small halves of courage making a brave whole.”
  • • conduit
• (121) “Gen translated it into French and German, Greek and Portuguese, each time careful to say their people outside. Something a translator should never do.”
• (122) “He would have chosen to stay like that young priest, but everyone likes to be asked.”
• (123) “The Japanese man would hum something and she would listen and nod and then, in a very quiet voice, she would sing it back to him. What a sweet sound.”
• (124) “ Had it only been last night that their clothes were fresh and they ate the little chops and listened to the aria of Dvořák? Or was Dvořák something they drank in small glasses after dinner?”
• (125) “who, lost inside the intricate world of his own fever, paid no attention to what was being said.”
• (127) “garúa, which was more than mist and less than drizzle and hung woolly and gray over the city in which they were now compelled to stay…. The garúa made sense, while atmospheric clarity would not.”
• (129) “So to rejoin the story a week after Mr. Hosokawa’s birthday party ended seems as good a place as any.”
  • Weird
• (131) Interesting book for quarantine
• (132) Hosokawa has language notebook too. (133) “It was in this simple repetition, the rediscovery of his own penmanship, that Mr. Hosokawa found solace.”
• (134) “They slept with a kind of single-minded concentration that every adult in the room had forgotten decades before.”
• “ They flushed the toilets again and again for the pleasure of watching the water swirl away.”
• (135) ““Where are you from?” the boy called Ishmael asked the Vice President. He thought of the Vice President as his own hostage because he had been the one to bring the ice from the kitchen when the Vice President was first injured.”
• “Ruben wanted to pull the child into his lap, to keep him.”
• (137) ““And so we shoot our way out. Just like television,” Pietro Genovese said. “Is that grapefruit juice?” He looked bored by the conversation even though he had just walked into it. He built air- ports. As a country’s industry enlarges, so must its airports.”
• ““We would need a dozen translators and arbitration from the UN before we could decide to overthrow the one teenager with a knife,” Jacques Maitessier said, as much to himself as anyone, and he knew what he was talking about, having once been the French ambassador to the United Nations.”
• (140) When Simon turns the TV on: “He thought that someone was playing some odd and beautiful old record and it made him curious. Then he saw the boy doing the show, a moderately funny boy, and thought he would get a kick out of the picture coming up suddenly where his face had been.”
• (141) “in a shuddering crumple of fear.”
• (142) “Logic held that if there was one girl then there could just as easily be more than one and everyone looked immediately towards the silent boy who never answered questions and had seemed in every way unnatural from the start, much too beautiful, too nervous.”
• (143) “He was the one who seemed so particularly in love with Roxane Coss and slept on the hallway floor outside her room at night, using his body to prevent any drafts from coming under the door. Gen looked at him, the one who had made him feel so uneasy, and the anxiousness he had held inside his chest rolled off of him in a long, low wave.”
• (146) “While he had lost every freedom he was most accustomed to, a new, smaller set of freedoms began to raise a dim light within him: the liberty to think obsessively, the right to remember in detail. Away from his wife and five daughters he was not contradicted or corrected, and without those burdens he found himself able to dream without constant revision. He had lived his life as a good father but now Oscar Mendoza saw again his life as a boy.”
• “ In his day, Oscar himself had made too many girls forget their better instincts and fine training by biting them with tender persistence at the base of their skull, just where the hairline grew in downy wisps. Girls were like kittens in this way, if you got them right at the nape of their neck they went easily limp.”
• (144) “ Look at this, I brought you some flowers (or a bird, a skein of yarn, a colored pencil. IT MADE NO DIFFERENCE).”
  • Somehow this book is not gross
• (149) “He hadn’t seen her coming. His back was to the room while he watched the garúa from the bay window. He was learning to relax as he watched it, to not strain his eyes. He was beginning to think he could see things.”
• “Until their capture, he had thought of his life in terms of achievement and success. Now it struck him as a long list of failures: he didn’t speak English or Italian or Spanish. He didn’t play the piano. He had never even tried to play the piano.”
• (151) “He had been dreaming of Esmeralda standing over the sink, peeling a potato.” 
• (152) “Ruben smiled as if he had accomplished something by growing his skin back together again.”
• (153) “Their voices fell over one another and from every corner of the room there 
• came the word, piano, piano, piano.”
  • This is musical: the layering of chords, all said by a different family (instrument, languish… language)
• (154) “In his heart he had never felt closer to Chopin, whom he loved like a father.”
• (154) “The felt-covered hammers tapped the strings gently at first, and the music, even for those who had never heard the piece before, was like a memory.”
• “Playing on this grand piano now Kato could imagine them sleeping and he put that into the nocturne, his sons’ steady breathing, his wife clutching her pillow with one hand.”
• “It would have been impossible to remember, his talent was to be invisible, to lift the soprano up, but now the people in the living room of the vice-presidential mansion listened to Kato with hunger and nothing in their lives had ever fed them so well.”
• (154) Something almost allegorical dream fairytale about this all these slumbering one contralto
• (155) “They were all at the piano, Roxane Coss and Mr. Hosokawa and Gen and Simon Thibault and the priest and the Vice President and Oscar Mendoza and little Ishmael and Beatriz and Carmen, who left her gun in the kitchen and came and stood with the rest. All of the Russians were there, and the Germans who had spoken of a revolt, and the Italians, who were weeping, and the two Greeks who were older than the rest of them. The boys were there, Paco and Ranato and Humberto and Bernardo and all the rest, the great and menacing hulk of boy flesh that seemed to soften with every note. Even the Generals came. 
  • How does this not fall into the sharp edge of sentimentality?
• Had there not been a need for a pianist there was little chance that Kato would have sat down that afternoon to play, though he had watched the piano the way the other men watched the door. 
• ““Fine, fine,” General Benjamin said, feeling good to think the accompanist that had been lost was now replaced. “Very well done,” Mr. Hosokawa said, so proud that it was a Nansei man stepping up for the job.  Twenty years he had known Kato. He knew his wife and the names of his children. How was it possible he did not know about the piano?”
• (160) “All his life he had wanted more time to listen, and when finally there was time there was nothing to listen to, only the patter of voices he could not understand, the occasional screeching of the police beyond the wall.”
• (161) ““The quality of the gift depends on the sincerity of the giver. It also helps if the gift is something the receiver actually wants. So far you’ve given me your handkerchief, your notebook, and your pen. All three things I wanted.” “The little I have here is yours,” he said with a sincerity that didn’t match her lightness. “You could have my shoes. My watch.”
• (170) “He felt his voice choke with emotion. Someone outside the house! It was like seeing a ghost from his former life, a silvery shadow walking down the aisle towards the altar. Manuel.”
• (171) ““Anything, my friend. Do they want money?” The priest smiled to think with all these wealthy men around it would be put to him to ask a music teacher for money.”
• (173) ““I swear it,” Simon said. He was already dialing the number. The phone rang five times and then the answering machine picked up the line. It was his own voice, saying first in Spanish and then again in French that they were out, saying they would return the call. Why hadn’t Edith recorded the message? What had he been thinking of? He put his hand over his eyes and began to cry. The sound of his own voice was almost unbearable to him. When it stopped there was a long, dull tone. “Je t’adore,” he said. “Je t’aime, Je t’adore.”
• (174) “It had occurred to him in his life that he had the soul of a machine and was only capable of motion when someone else turned the key. He was very good at working and he was very good at being by himself. Sitting alone in his apartment with books and tapes, he would pick up languages the way other men picked up women, with smooth talk and then later, passion.”
• (180) ““Kato played Chopin?” Messner said. “The nocturnes? I’m sorry I missed that.” “Chopin played,” Carmen said. “No,” Gen said. “The man who played was Señor Kato. The music he played was written by Señor Chopin.” “Very beautiful,” she said again, and suddenly her eyes welled up with tears and she parted her lips slightly not to speak but to breathe.”
• (186) “They could hear its beauty without being paralyzed by it.”
• (188) “ This was the happiest time of her life and it was because of the music. When she was a child dreaming on her pallet at night, she never dreamed of pleasures like these. None of her family, left behind in the mountains, could have understood that there was a house made of bricks and sealed glass windows that was never too hot or too cold. She could not have believed that somewhere in the world there was a vast expanse of carpet embroidered to look like a meadow of flowers, or that ceilings came tipped in gold, or that there could be pale marble women who stood on either side of a fireplace and balanced the mantelpiece on their heads. And that would have been enough, the music and the paintings and the garden which she patrolled with her rifle, but in addition there was food that came every day, so much food that some was always wasted no matter how hard they tried to eat it all. There were deep white bathtubs with an endless supply of hot water pouring out of the curved silver spigots. There were stacks of soft white towels and pillows and blankets trimmed in satin and so much space inside that you could wander off and no one would know where you had gone. Yes, the Generals wanted something better for the people, but weren’t they the people? Would it be the worst thing in the world if nothing happened at all, if they all stayed together in this generous house? Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.
• (189) “What experience did she have of piano music and paintings of the Madonna? What experience did she have of asking? Carmen held her breath and stretched out on the floor next to Gen. She was as silent as light on the leaves of trees.” 
• (190) “And now the voice that was calling was walking away and Gen left the beach to follow it, followed the voice from sleep to waking.”
• (194) “ Now that Roxane knew Carmen was a girl she let her sit on the bed with her and drink out of her cup. She liked to braid Carmen’s hair, which was as shiny and black as a pool of oil.”
• (195) “The first thing she sang that morning was the aria from Rusalka, which she remembered was the one Mr. Hosokawa had requested that she sing for his birthday, before she knew him, before she knew anything. How she loved that story, the spirit of the water who longs to be a woman who can hold her lover in real arms instead of cool waves.”
• (196) In response to Hosokawa saying Roxanne sings in Czech like she was meant to: “ She sang the passion of every syllable, but none of the syllables actually managed to form themselves into recognizable words of the language. It was quite obvious that she had memorized the work phonetically, that she sang her love for Dvořák and her love for the translated story, but that the Czech language itself was a stranger which passed her by without a moment’s recognition.”
  • I wrote: “I bought about this with what David Laurie says about music.” Now, idk what that means. Or who that is.
• (197) “ A gift to the people, a diversion to the military.”
• (215) ““That I would never presume to know. Whatever song you choose is the song I have been wanting to hear.” “Very impressive,” Gen said to him in Spanish. Ruben gave him a look that made it clear he had no interest in editorials.”
• (217) Eggplant: “ It didn’t smell like much and yet there was something vaguely dark and loamy, something alive that made him want to bite down.”
• (221) “Poco Esperanza. Little Hope.” Doubled.
• (229) “All that was lovely about the eggplant fell into ribbons on the floor.”
• (239) “They circled each other, each one oblivious to feelings, each caring only for the music.”
• (240) ‘ She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.”
• (242) “Yes, she was shy, and yes, a terrorist from the jungle, but she was as smart as any girl he had met at university. You could tell by the way she picked things up. All she had needed was the smallest amount of instruction. She ate through information like fire licks up hay and asked for more.”
• (248) “A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air. A kiss, another kiss.”
• (250) “The Slavic language was pear brandy on his tongue.”
• (251) ““Commas,” he said through a yawn, “pause the sentence and separate ideas.”
  • Words are music; a score.
• “Ignacio, Guadalupe, and Humberto were at the breakfast table cleaning guns, a puzzle of disconnected metal spreading out on newspapers before them as they rubbed oil into each part. Thibault sat at the table with them, reading cookbooks.”
• (253) “Except, of course, for Simon Thibault, who sat there with his cookbooks, wearing his wife’s blue wrap like a flag. Everyone knew Thibault was in love.”
• (254) “A word was a word if you spoke it or wrote it down.”
  • It’s not; it’s music.
• (256) “It was easy to sound tired in Russian.”
• (257) ““Is she listening to the story?” “You can tell as well as I can.””
• “You could mark our rise in the world by our position in the opera house, by what we paid and, later, what we were given. Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev, we saw everything that was Russian.”
• (260) The Russian confessing his love through telling of his grandmother’s book of reproductions of Impressionist masterpieces that no longer exist. “Of course she was making it up because the stories would change. Not that it mattered. They were beautiful stories.” “But it was the rest from it, the waiting, that made us love the book so madly. “What a miracle is that? I was taught to love beautiful things. I had a language in which to consider beauty.”
  • this is so masterful; this done through a love confession. how to implant my ideas in smart uncontrived ways.
• (262) “The dead we can imagine to be anything at all.”
• (263) “It simply had not occurred to him to say it and now on the first day of his life when it might have been appropriate to speak of love to a woman, he would be declaring it for another man to another woman.
  • Interesting ideas about analogy; being a mouthpiece…
• (266) ““There is nothing to say,” Fyodorov interrupted. “It is a gift. There. Something to give to you. If I had the necklace or a book of paintings I would give you that instead. I would give you that in addition to my love.”
• (267) ““It’s easier to love a woman when you can’t understand a word she’s saying,” Roxane said.”
• Cesar’s bad skin is clearing up.
• (268) “ Once something is named it can never be eaten.”
  • In retrospect, once something is loved, it can’t be killed….
• (269) ““People love each other for all sorts of different reasons,” Roxane said, her lack of Spanish keeping her innocent of the conversation, slow-roasted guinea pigs on a spit. “Most of the time we’re loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It’s not such a bad thing, being loved for what you can do.” “But the other is better,” Gen said.”
• (271) “ He never forgot it, but during the game he did not live exactly in the center of it.”
• (273) “Where before there had been endless hours of work, negotiations and compromises, there were now chess games with a terrorist for whom he felt an unaccountable fondness. Where there had been a respectable family that functioned in the highest order, there were now people he loved and could not speak to.”
• (274) “The two observers who managed to stay and never fall asleep were Ishmael and Roxane. Roxane came to watch the performance of Mr. Hosokawa, who, after all, spent so much of his time watching her, and Ishmael stayed because eventually he wanted to play chess with General Benjamin and Mr. Hosokawa, only he wasn’t sure if such a thing was actually allowed.”
• (275) “He didn’t know the names of the pieces because no one in the room ever spoke. He practiced in his head the most appropriate way of broaching the subject.”
  • Huh, so interesting. The various ways of knowing something. Like how you might not speak the language but you love the person.
• (278) “Roxane looked up at him, blinked a pretty stage blink, large and pleased.”
• It just occurred to me that Mr. Hosokawa might have died for Carmen without even knowing Gen loved her. Is that true?
• (279) “He was rocking it side to side. The words passed over him, around him, like water passing over a stone.”
• (283) “Messner was distracted. His conversation with Roxane should have lasted longer. They didn’t need Gen. Messner often dreamed in English.”
• (284) “The Vice President, sensing the ridiculousness of his anger, the burden on his friend, touched his own cheek.”
• (285) “ he would have rather been a hostage himself instead of bearing the burden of being the only person in the world who was free to come and go. She thought about Schubert lieder, Puccini’s arias.”
• (299) “ There was Gen, who had gone from nothing to loving two people.”
• (306) “Scattered among them were a handful of soldiers sprawled on their backs as if sleep was a car that had hit them dead on, their necks twisted sideways, their mouths wrenched open, their rifles resting in their open hands like ripe fruit.”
• (320) “She was the singer. He was only a boy who loved her by singing. Or was it singing he loved? He could no longer remember. He was too far inside. He closed his eyes and followed his voice. Somewhere far away he heard the piano tailing him, then catching up, then leading him ahead. The end of the aria was very high and he had no idea if he would make it. It was like falling, no, like diving, twisting your body through the air without a single thought as to how it might land.”
• (322) “Always there was Carmen, her bright dark eyes turned up to him, ready to help him like a person whose life you’ve saved.”
• (323) Cesar, the no longer acne-ridden opera singer: “(Because Carmen was completely discreet he knew nothing about the rest of it: that she had slept in Roxane’s bed, brushed her hair, that Carmen had smuggled Roxane’s lover to her in the middle of the night and held her confidence. Had he known all of that he might have imploded with jealousy.)”
• (324) “Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.”
• (327) “She could see his beauty as someone who took nothing for granted. Look at that beautiful man, that brilliant man, he loves me.”
• (340) ““She doesn’t think I’m a fool?” “He wants to know if you think he’s a fool,” Gen said. She sighed at the self-indulgence of children. “Staying up in the tree seems foolish, but the singing, not at all.” “Foolish for the tree and not the singing,” Gen reported. “Come down and talk to her.””
• (361) “Bellini’s “Malinconia, Ninfa Gentile,” the first, short song from Sei Ariette.
• ““It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”
• (364) “How had he fallen in love with so many people?”
• (370) “He was finding his own depth. Every morning, he unfolded his voice before them like a rare jeweled fan; the more you listened, the more intricate it became.”
• (373) “The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months but still the light was everywhere.”
• (375) “The Vice President was crying into the boy’s neck, his eyes pressed closed, his mouth stretched open wide. He was holding his child’s lovely head in his hands. In Ishmael’s hands was the spoon with which he had been digging.”
  • Ahhhhh
• “She had more in common with the strangers who were shooting because she and they were all alive.”
• “A pain exploded up high in her chest and spit her out of this terrible world.”
• (378) At the realization: “Whaaat.”
• (384) AP: “I wanted to write a book that would be flat-out melodramatic in 
• that operatic way.”
• (385) “SA: How much research did you do into this actual incident? Did you visit Peru? AP: It’s sort of a funny story because it’s one of those classic pointless novel-research junkets in one sense…. Originally, I was going to set the book not in Lima but up in the mountains, because I wanted to do something with altitude sickness and its affect on the characters.”
• (392) “AP: Very simply, if Roxane was singing something in a given scene I would put the aria on and have it play ten times over. I would try to write the moment as I was listening to it. I became hugely, hugely interested in opera.”
  • That’s interesting, it comes out probably not in the description of the music itself but on the scenebuilding; what characters do, where they are.
• (393) “But I will say that my books are inspired by my books. There can be something that I’ll get into in a minor way in one book and then I’ll think that I want to open it up some more later on. The Magician’s Assistant was a book about people who were all from someplace else, trying to assimilate in some sense. I was very interested in that theme and I thought I’d like to do a lot more with it in my next book. So that was part of the reason that I got to South America for Bel Canto.”
• (396) Czech thing: “That’s the kind of thing that I never would have come up with on my own and I feel so fortunate to have been able to steal if off somebody else.”
• “SA: Unlike some authors I’ve known, who basically want their publisher to operate like a kind of souped-up Kinko’s, you seem to really enjoy the give-and-take of the editorial process.”
• “Originally the book had a first person prologue and a first person epilogue, both by Gen — which then implied that the whole book was written by Gen. The basic theme of the prologue was, “This is the story of how I met my wife.” ”
• (397) “The biggest achievement of this book for me, the thing that I am most proud of, is the narrative structure — that kind of third person narrative that I think of as Russian, wherein the point of view just seamlessly moves among the characters. That was the hardest part of writing the book. It was what took me so long. It’s the thing I’ve wanted to do since I started writing fiction.
• (398) “AP: I think of these qualities as being two great measures of what it means to be a cultured person, and I completely dropped the ball on both of them. Truly, the writing of this story comes out of that shame, and wanting to examine it and make peace with it.
  • U can write what you don’t know
• “But I was so moved by the Japanese embassy story and it took place over such a long period of time that I really got to think about what was happening there. When the guerillas were all shot I really did want to experience it. I wanted to find a way to take some time to feel bad about that loss. I’ll never know what really happened. I can be pretty sure it bore little resemblance to what I heard on the news. Still, I wanted to find a way to experience it, to take emotional responsibility for it. On a moral level. To be able to say there’s been a real loss and I need to stop and grieve for these people.”