Bel Canto was published by HarperCollins in 2001 and won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction. The novel is loosely inspired by the 1996 Japanese embassy hostage crisis in Lima, Peru, when members of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement held hundreds of hostages for over four months.
In Patchett’s version, terrorists storm a birthday party held for a Japanese electronics mogul at the vice-presidential mansion of an unnamed South American country. The party’s centerpiece was a performance by the renowned American soprano Roxane Coss, and when the crisis drags on — weeks, then months — her singing becomes the hostage community’s organizing force. The terrorists lower their weapons to listen. The hostages find in Coss’s voice a beauty that makes their confinement bearable. Relationships form across every boundary: between captors and captives, between people who share no common language, between individuals who would never have met outside this artificial community.
Patchett’s achievement is tonal. The novel is a fable about art’s capacity to create community across difference — but it never becomes naive about the political realities it brackets. The hostages know they may die. The terrorists know the military will eventually storm the building. The love affairs that develop (between the Japanese businessman Hosokawa and Roxane Coss, between the young terrorist Carmen and the translator Gen) are real but doomed by the situation that made them possible. The ending — sudden, violent, and followed by an epilogue that domesticates the extraordinary into the ordinary — has been debated since publication.
Collecting Bel Canto
First edition (HarperCollins, New York, 2001): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75
- Signed: $150–$400