12.12.08

On Reading and Bel Canto

Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 7:51 pm by Miracle ♪♫

If one were to rely on my inferior storytelling, the attempt to summarize this book would rob it of its marvel. Earlier this afternoon, a friend inquired about its contents and after my lame effort at a synopsis, she asked, “Hindi ba corny?”

I should have let her read Bel Canto’s back cover instead.

“…in South America, at the home of the country’s vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxanne Coss, opera’s most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening – until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty…”

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It may be many things but corny is not one of this novel’s qualities. It is no surprise that it snagged both the United Kingdom’s prestigious Orange Prize and the United States’ PEN/Faulkner Award. Each character and phrase is beautifully crafted and one can only wonder how Ann Patchett successfully weaved music, politics, and love. The musicality contained in the pages is amazing and it has the power to move one to recognize the force and virtue of music as it unites the diversity of language, beliefs, and personalities. The ending seemed unsatisfactory at first, but when one begins to relish its fading sentences, a bittersweet-ness sinks in, similar to that of an aria which possesses a silencing essence.

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Earlier this week, someone was promised an explanation on why I make notes of the books I read. A few lines have been prepared (e.g. it is my way of digesting what I have devoured), but these, like the Bel Canto summary in my own words, have been canceled in order to make way for better words.  This time, Marcel Proust’s greater words:

“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favourite book. Everything that filled them for others, so it seemed, and that we dismissed as a vulgar obstacle to a divine pleasure: the game for which a friend would come to fetch us at the most interesting passage; the troublesome bee or sun ray that forced us to lift our eyes from the page or to change position; the provisions for the afternoon snack that we had been made to take along and that we left beside us on the bench, without touching, while above our head the sun was diminishing in the force in the blue sky; the dinner we had to return home for, and during which we thought only of going up immediately afterward to finish the interrupted chapter, all those things which reading should have kept us from feeling anything but annoyance at, it has on the contrary engraved in us so sweet a memory of (so much more precious to our present judgement than what we read then with such love), that if we still happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of days that have vanished, and we hope to see reflected on their pages the dwellings and the ponds which no longer exist.”
“On Reading” (1906)

…and my friend, the explanation? I am merely doodling childish markings on my calendar. ;-)

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