I came in with no expectations, just looking for something to read. (The library has been pretty slow lately.) I really enjoyed The Dutch House, also by Ann Patchett, but not so much that I plan to read it over and over again, regularly every few years as a reminder of how to live.
The premise of Bel Canto is simple and nearly a cliche. And as I later learned, it’s based on a real international incident. A snazzy dinner party is ambushed by revolutionary terrorists, and its high-profile guests from all over the world are held hostage. Over the course of four months, the hostage situation morphs into a commune of sorts as hostages and terrorists alike grow accustomed to their new lives. But obviously it can’t last forever, can it?
It took me a little while to be pulled in. I picked up the bottle episode vibes early on and unfairly pegged it as a worse version of Anxious People because I loved Anxious People and felt a strange loyalty to it. I don’t like comparing books, so I’ll just say the second half of Bel Canto was absolutely splendid.
Within a hostage situation, Patchett creates the closest thing to heaven I can imagine exists in this world or another. A place where beauty can be appreciated, where people with supposedly nothing in common are able to connect over shared hardship, where people have the time and resources to discover passions and talents, where dreadfully busy people are granted the chance to slow down and reflect, where people have their basic needs met (for the most part), and are therefore able to “forget themselves and live in the needs of the day.”
During lockdown in 2020, I graduated college over Zoom and had nothing to do but stay inside and enjoy my family’s company. I was by great fortune in a near-perfect temporary limbo of my own, and had I picked up Bel Canto then, I doubt I’d be as inspired.
Now I’m knee-deep in the workforce, living more or less on my own in a new city, trying my best and struggling wonderfully to figure out whether a delicate balance can exist in my life between ambition, comfort, friends and family, community, idleness, reflection, adventure, health, and presence.
If forced to shorten the list, I’d say it comes down to crafting a rich enough life of Community and Comfort.
Community because we find purpose, compassion, excitement, and adventure in others. “The efflux of the soul is happiness,” and this nature can only be unlocked in the presence of others. (Note: I know this sentence sounds like quasi-spiritual BS but it’s honestly what I believe — I just haven’t come up with a way to say it that sounds less lame.) There is a time to be alone, but flourishing requires others. “Success does not happen in a vacuum.”
Comfort because we all need to eat. And this is where the problem lies. To me, Comfort means being able to do what needs to be done without feeling rushed and still have time after that. It’s a state of privilege that most humans throughout history haven’t experienced for a week, and that very few are able to enjoy even today. It means leisure, health, money, and not overworking. Certainly not overworking to the extent where the stress is deteriorating your body and you need medication to fight off the breakdown that’s only trying to do its job by telling you to quit yours.
And it’s the fear of discomfort or the perception that you’re on the edge of losing your own comfort that makes people do some extremely nasty things to stay ahead. And (sometimes) rightfully so. Poverty is awful.
The “commune” in Bel Canto had their needs met. Patchett muses how it was a spectacular set of individually one-in-a-million coincidences that led to the least likely of situations, but they also had the equally miraculous gift of effortless comfort. They were delivered food. They had shelter by default. Captivity almost required them to be present and not worry about their futures, to give due appreciation to the tall grass and the night stars.
And this is another key. Comfort (and Community to its own extent) can transform into presence. When you don’t need to worry about making enough today to be able to eat tomorrow, it is much easier to appreciate today for the gift that it is.
I understand that even in Fantasyland you can’t have everything, and Patchett’s heroes and anti-heroes certainly didn’t have everything. But my ideal solution may be something similar to the siege of the Vice President’s house in Bel Canto’s unnamed host country, just minus the danger and death and impossibility of it all.
Reading has the power to grant you that magical feeling of brief clarity, and that’s one of the reasons I love it so much.
excerpts (spoilers, probably)
Many years later, when everything was business, when he worked harder than anyone in a country whose values are structured on hard work, he believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. (5)
I won’t complain about your inconsistencies. (122)
Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it … There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see. (219)
“As for the love,” “There is nothing to say. It is a gift. There. Something to give to you. If I had the necklace or a book of paintings I would give that to you instead. I would give you that in addition to my love.” (221)
How much luck is one person entitled to in a night? Does it come in a limited allotment, like milk in a bottle, and when so much has been poured out then only so much is left? Or was luck a matter of the day, and on the day you’re lucky you are limitlessly lucky? If it was the former, then surely Carmen had used up all her luck getting Mr. Hosokawa safely into Roxane Coss’s bedroom. But if it was the latter, and in her bones she felt this was the truth, then this was her night. (260)
For Gen the night seemed miraculous, the air and the sky, the soft crush of grass beneath his heel. He was back in the world and the world looked, on that night, to be an incomprehensibly beautiful place. Such a limited view he was given yet still he would swear to it, the world was beautiful. (261)
Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice. (271)
It was a miraculous thing to be able to watch the person you love undetected, as if you were a stranger seeing them for the first time. She could see his beauty as someone who took nothing for granted. (272)
Every one of the hostages was walking around the yard like he was drunk or blind, touching and sniffing, weaving and then suddenly sitting down. They were in love with the place. They wouldn’t leave if you tore the wall down. If you poked them in the back with your gun and told them to get going they would still run to you. (283)
It was learning humility, to no longer assume that anyone would notice who you were or where you were going. It wasn’t until she began to teach him that Mr. Hosokawa saw Carmen‘s genius, because her genius was to not be seen… When Carmen walked through The room without wanting to be seen she hardly moved the air around her. (290)
Mr. Hosokawa had a private life now. He had always thought of himself as a private man, but now he saw that there was nothing in his life before that had been private. It didn’t mean that he had no secrets then and now he did. It was that now there was something that was strictly between himself and one other person, that it was so completely their own that it would have been pointless to even try to speak of it to someone else. He wondered now if everyone had a private life… maybe as a private life wasn’t forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering. (292)
