Book Club Guide

Bel Canto

by Ann Patchett · 2001 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Art and beauty as forces that create connection across every divide
The suspended world of captivity — and what it allows to develop
The opera singer's voice as the novel's transformative centre

About this book

When terrorists seize a South American vice-president's mansion during a soprano's recital, they take dozens of hostages — and the weeks of captivity that follow become a strange, suspended world in which music, love and an unlikely community develop in the middle of a political crisis. Patchett's PEN/Faulkner winner is about beauty, connection and the life that forms in confinement.

Published in 2001, Bel Canto won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Patchett based it on the Peruvian hostage crisis of 1996-97, when MRTA guerrillas seized the Japanese ambassador's residence.

Discussion questions

The soprano Roxane Coss's singing transforms the hostage situation. How does Patchett develop this — and what is she saying about what art does to people even in extremity?
The terrorists and the hostages gradually develop real relationships. How does Patchett manage this — avoiding sentimentality while still making it emotionally credible?
Hosokawa, the Japanese businessman, falls in love with Roxane. How does Patchett develop this love — and what does the language barrier (resolved through the interpreter Gen) add?
The novel is based loosely on the 1996-97 Lima hostage crisis. How does Patchett use the real event — as framework, as inspiration, or as something she deliberately distorts?
The ending is sudden and shocking. How does Patchett earn it — and what does the coda (the final pages) do to the novel's argument about love and art?