Bel Canto takes place in South America and features a hodgepodge group of socialites, politicians, and country leaders that come together for a birthday party for Mr. Hosokawa, a Japanese businessman. Mr. Hosokawa is initally reluctant to attend, but is immediately compelled to fly to the event when his favorite opera singer Roxane Coss is booked for the night. The guests are mingling and enjoying the music until terrorists intrude and take them hostage. The book focuses on the friendships that are made or broken and the relationships that are strengthened or weakened in times of emergency.
The narrative is somewhat flowery, but in that way mirrors the musicality of an opera, an explicit theme of the story. I enjoyed the way Patchett shows how the characters, strangers to one another at first, grow closer through a universal appreciation of music despite language and cultural barriers. I will admit that the middle hundred-page chunk was a bit slow, and it's hard to believe that certain individuals within such a random group of birthday attendees would establish such intense romantic relationships so quickly, but I suppose that underlying commonalities among strangers is one of the main points of the book. Spoiler alert: At the end, the description of each main terrorist captor's death during the "rescue" mission of the government made me sad since details about their personal life, families, and dreams had been established by then. The description of the violence in the final scene is much more traumatic that the initial takeover by the terrorists, which makes the reader question the definitions of "good" and "bad." Overall, Bel Canto is an oddly simultaneously romantic and violent story that takes an introspective look at the emotional development of its main characters.
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