bel canto book review new york times

Ann Patchett

318 pages, Paperback

First published May 22, 2001

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Bel canto , (Italian: “beautiful singing”) style of operatic singing that originated in Italian singing of polyphonic (multipart) music and Italian courtly solo singing during the late 16th century and that was developed in Italian opera in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. Using a relatively small dynamic range, bel canto singing was based on an exact control of the intensity of vocal tone, a recognition of the distinction between the “diapason tone” (produced when the larynx is in a relatively low position) and the “flute tone” (when the larynx is in a higher position), and a demand for vocal agility and clear articulation of notes and enunciation of words. - Encyclopaedia Britannica

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by Ann Patchett ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2001

Combining an unerring instinct for telling detail with the broader brushstrokes you need to tackle issues of culture and politics, Patchett ( The Magician’s Assistant , 1997, etc.) creates a remarkably compelling chronicle of a multinational group of the rich and powerful held hostage for months.

An unnamed impoverished South American country hopes to woo business from a rich Japanese industrialist, Mr. Hosokawa, by hosting a birthday party at which his favorite opera singer, Roxane Coss, entertains. Because the president refuses to miss his soap opera, the vice-president hosts the party. An invading band of terrorists, who planned to kidnap the president, find themselves instead with dozens of hostages on their hands. They free the less important men and all the women except Roxane. As the remaining hostages and their captors settle in, Gen, Mr. Hosokawa’s multilingual translator, becomes the group’s communication link, Roxane and her music its unifying heart. Patchett weaves individual histories of the hostages and the not-so-terrifying terrorists within a tapestry of their present life together. The most minor character breathes with life. Each page is dense with incident, the smallest details magnified by the drama of the situation and by the intensity confinement always creates. The outside world recedes as time seems to stop; the boundaries between captive and captor blur. In pellucid prose, Patchett grapples with issues of complexity and moral ambiguity that arise as confinement becomes not only a way of life but also for some, both hostage and hostage-taker, a life preferable to their previous existence. Readers may intellectually reject the author’s willingness to embrace the terrorists’ humanity, but only the hardest heart will not succumb. Conventional romantic love also flowers, between Gen and Carmen, a beguilingly innocent terrorist, between Mr. Hosokawa and Roxane. Even more compelling are the protective, almost familial affections that arise, the small acts of kindness in what is, inevitably, a tragedy.

Pub Date: June 2, 2001

ISBN: 0-06-018873-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001

ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE

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IT ENDS WITH US

by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2016

Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...

Hoover’s ( November 9 , 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.

At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.

Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016

GENERAL ROMANCE | ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE

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by Colleen Hoover

LOVE AND OTHER WORDS

by Christina Lauren ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 10, 2018

With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.

Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.

Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.

Pub Date: April 10, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018

GENERAL ROMANCE | ROMANCE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE

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by Christina Lauren

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Captivating stories from the american west to west africa.

Book Review: Bel Canto

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, is an extraordinary novel that held me captive from beginning to end. As a matter of fact, being held captive is what this book is all about.

A prestigious party is being held at the home of a Vice President somewhere in South America. The occasion is honoring the birthday of Mr.Kosokawa, a powerful businessman from Japan. The famous opera soprano, Roxane Coss, has enthralled the international guests with her singing. It’s a grand event. Until terrorists take the entire party hostage.

From the beginning, the take-over goes awry. The person being sought, the President of the country, isn’t in attendance. This causes great confusion among the three generals leading a gang of gun-wielding youths.

Nothing goes according to plan, but life goes on. From a panicked, life-threatening situation, people fall into a routine. They cooperate, form bonds, friendships, even fall in love.

This is a marvelous, entertaining book, a New York Times Bestseller and winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award. For me, it hit a profound chord. When my husband and I were with the Peace Corps in The Gambia, West Africa, we were “detained” in a single house for 8 days, along with 118 people from many different countries. This book brought back vivid memories of that attempted military takeover.

I highly recommend Bel Canto . You’ll find yourself bunking in with many interesting international house guests.

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About this ebook

"Bel Canto is its own universe. A marvel of a book." —Washington Post Book World

New York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett’s spellbinding novel about love and opera, and the unifying ways people learn to communicate across cultural barriers in times of crisis

Somewhere 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, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots, intimate friends, and lovers.

Patchett's lyrical prose and lucid imagination make Bel Canto a captivating story of strength and frailty, love and imprisonment, and an inspiring tale of transcendent romance.

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About the author

Ann Patchett is the author of novels, most recently the #1 New York Times bestselling Tom Lake, works of nonfiction, and children's books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner, the Women's Prize in the UK, and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and Time magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. President Biden awarded her the National Humanities Medal in recognition of her contributions to American culture. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the owner of Parnassus Books. Visit her at annpatchett.com.

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New York Times Bestselling Author

Barbara Delinsky

Book review.

Why did I wait so long to read BEL CANTO?  Because the synopsis starts with mention of a terrorist takeover at an A-list social event in South America, and I don’t do terrorism for pleasure.  Since I read for pleasure, seeing the word “terrorist” was enough to turn me off.

How.  Stupid.  Ann Patchett is one of my favorite authors, and so many of my friends had loved BEL CANTO that I should have listened.  Ach.  Better later than never.

The fact is, I don’t think I’ve smiled, even laughed so much reading a book as I did reading (listening to, actually) this one.  There was dry wit and out-and-out humor.  It helped that the audiobook reader was phenomenal.  She had so many different voices to portray – Opera singer, two female terrorists, three Asian men, three Latin generals, a Russian, a Frenchman – that a lesser reader would have failed.  This one spoke perfectly in all these different voices.

The real gem, though, is Ann Patchett.  She isn’t full of herself.  Her writing is smooth and vivid, if spare.  She imbues each of these characters with unique qualities, all of which blend to make her story an exquisite tapestry.

“Bel Canto” translates to “beautiful singing,” and yes, opera plays a part in the book.  Not being an opera buff, I wasn’t so much intrigued by this, though, as by the emotional growth of the characters as days of siege become weeks, then months.  Some reviewers point to Stockholm Syndrome to account for the connections that form between captives and captors, but I think there’s more.  What we see in BEL CANTO is the removal of people from their prescribed lives enough to be able to see themselves and their strengths in very different ways.

BEL CANTO has zoomed to the top of my all-time-favorites list.  I highly recommend it!

clock This article was published more than  5 years ago

The book ‘Bel Canto’ is a modern classic. The movie ‘Bel Canto’ isn’t — but it’s worth seeing anyway

The transcendent and unifying power of music has inspired any number of movies, but “Bel Canto” might be the first to involve a hostage crisis. The adaptation of Ann Patchett’s award-winning 2001 bestseller is based on real events in Peru in 1996, when rebels from the leftist Túpac Amaru movement raided a party at the Japanese ambassador’s residence and took hundreds of civilians hostage.

Like the novel, the film is set in an unnamed South American nation, where the famous American opera singer Roxane Coss (Julianne Moore) has been invited to perform at a private gathering at the home of the vice president. The guest of honor is Katsumi Hosokawa (Ken Watanabe), a leading Japanese industrialist who is being courted in the hope that he’ll build a factory in the developing country, and who has long admired the singer.

The insurgents who storm the mansion quickly discover that their target, the president, had skipped the event at the last minute, leaving them stuck with an international crowd of diplomats and busi­ness­peo­ple. They soon release the women — except for Roxane, their highest-value captive. The impasse drags on for months, during which time a Red Cross staffer (Sebastian Koch) determinedly attempts to negotiate between the rebels and the government, while Hosokawa’s multilingual personal translator, Gen (Ryo Kase), becomes an interpreter for practically everyone.

Despite some trimming of plot and characters, the narrative closely follows that of the book. The ensemble cast features strong performances from Moore, Watanabe and Koch, as well as Tenoch Huerta and Maria Mercedes Coroy as members of the rebel group.

The film empathetically shows its characters’ humanity and the unlikely relationships that develop between captor and captive, as political, linguistic and socioeconomic barriers break down amid their close quarters and shared awe for the music. The story slowly builds toward the crushing reality of its brutal resolution — you know all along that it can’t end well.

And yet something seems to have been lost in the translation of Patchett’s luminous prose to the screen. Where the novel’s omniscient narrator provides ample insight into its protagonists’ interior thoughts and backstories, much of that is missing here: Some characters, particularly Gen, come across as flat, their motivations not deeply explored or explained. Romantic episodes that should burst with dramatic tension feel muted, lacking real chemistry or passion.

None of that is helped by an overly distracting score that, during the non-opera scenes, doesn’t strike an appropriate mood for some of the moments it’s paired with.

The dialogue is also inaccessible or cumbersome at times. Director Paul Weitz (“About a Boy”) sought to maintain authenticity — and an important premise of the novel — by not having all the characters speak English. There are frequent exchanges in other languages, as when Gen and Hosokawa communicate in Japanese, or the rebels speak Spanish. But some lines are not subtitled, making for a sometimes confusing viewing experience.

World-renowned soprano Renée Fleming wonderfully voices Roxane’s singing, with Moore convincingly embodying music’s great capacity to bring people together. But although the story itself is worthy of an opera plot — and, in fact, was adapted for that genre — one wishes the staging was more consistently gripping.

Unrated. At the Angelika Pop-Up at Union Market. Contains scenes of violence. In English, Spanish, French, Japanese and other languages with subtitles. 100 minutes.

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“The Sisters Brothers” Is Not Your Average Western

By Anthony Lane

What is it with Jacques Audiard and amputation? The heroine of “ Rust and Bone ” (2012) spent much of the movie without her legs, having been lunched on by a killer whale. Now we have “ The Sisters Brothers ,” in which an important character mislays an arm—a manageable loss, except that the film is a Western, and the limb used to come in handy whenever a gun needed slinging. Who’s afraid of a one-armed cowboy?

The story, based on Patrick deWitt’s novel of the same name, begins in 1851, at the fulcrum of the nineteenth century. The action sets off in Oregon and heads south, often at a canter, sometimes at a more leisurely pace, even pausing for a gawk at San Francisco. The principal riders are Charlie Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix) and his brother Eli (John C. Reilly). Charlie is a hothead and a brute—the stronger partner, you’d say, were he not ravened by a weakness for booze. So heavy is one hangover that he falls off his horse. Eli is the lumbering half of the duo, less cocksure and more tempted by the thought of a well-earned retirement. The boys could not be less alike, but they can’t do without each other, and what binds them together is their job. They are paid to murder.

Their employer is known as the Commodore, whom we see only fleetingly and who is never heard to speak. This is a shame, since he’s played by Rutger Hauer. (Was the role originally meatier, perhaps, before being pared to near-nothing?) For their latest mission, Charlie and Eli must find a fellow named Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), who is not, as you might imagine, a Muppet but a law-abiding chemist. He is said to have “no friends, no baggage, no money,” but also to have invented a process for increasing the yield of treasure from gold-bearing rivers. The brothers are to mine the knowledge out of him, by any means necessary, and then shut him down.

First, however, the poor sap needs to be located, and so a scout, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), is sent ahead, the idea being that he will befriend the chemist, detain him, and wait. Morris is the most singular figure onscreen, and a graceful addition to Gyllenhaal’s gallery of loners, compiled in films like “ Enemy ” (2013), “ Nightcrawler ” (2014), and “ Demolition ” (2015). As an actor, he seems to be keeping something back, or clutching it tight, and such tacit withholding draws us instinctively toward him; it’s an especially good fit for this movie, which glitters with half-revealed secrets. The gold rush may have been crowded, but it was not a collective effort. As Chaplin realized, it swarmed with solitaries, all of them dreaming, like dragons, of a private hoard.

Hence the touching encounter between Morris and Warm, who turns out to be a kindred spirit, shy and unalloyed in his ideals, impossible to target or to hate. Morris decides to join him in his quest rather than set him up for slaughter, and, at this pivotal point, the loyalties in the tale begin to shift. Soon other characters follow suit, going against the grain of their own rough natures. Why do we keep faith with these fickle souls? Partly because transmutation is Audiard’s stock-in-trade. He is French, and “The Sisters Brothers” is his first film in English, but Charlie, Eli, Morris, and Warm are of a piece with the protagonist of “ A Self-Made Hero ” (1997), who pretends to have been a member of the French Resistance, and with the Tamil fighter in “ Dheepan ” (2016), who flees the civil war in Sri Lanka and ends up as a caretaker in Paris. All these people feel compelled to become other than what they were. The journey is not always a success.

But there’s another reason for the lure of “The Sisters Brothers.” If the lives that it portrays are in transit, the world that encircles them is in even faster flux. We listen to a letter written by Morris, in voice-over. “I have travelled through places that didn’t exist three months ago,” he says, before listing the signs of activity. “First tents, then houses, then shops, with women fiercely discussing the price of flour.” There’s a thrill to that specificity, but it isn’t just the floury detail of the dialogue that makes the movie rise. Look at Eli buying his first-ever toothbrush, devoutly studying the instructions, and being startled, one morning, by the sight of somebody else cleaning his teeth, in the open air. Brushfight at the O.K. Corral!

The cinematic brawl between the wild and the supposedly civilized is hardly a novel theme. When the frame of a house is lofted into position, in Audiard’s film, we are reminded of other hoistings and half-built habitations, like the skeletal church tower in “ My Darling Clementine ” (1946), which lacks both a preacher and a name. So what has changed between John Ford’s classic, all about Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and his brothers, and Audiard’s approach? Well, for one thing, courtesy has shaded into comedy. Whereas Fonda, in his gentlest tones, asks a hotel clerk for buckets of hot water so that a lady can take a bath, John C. Reilly, as Eli, lets out a simple yip of delight on confronting a flush toilet. Lavatorologists will quibble (the earliest such contraptions, displayed in London at the Great Exhibition of 1851, had not yet arrived in America), but the joke holds firm, and Eli has seen a more commodious future. He pulls the chain like somebody launching a ship.

Not that the film eases up on savage behavior. “Hey, this is the Sisters Brothers!” is the first thing we hear. Echoes of “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees!,” you might think, except that Charlie and Eli aren’t just trying to be friendly. Out on the prairie, shrouded by darkness, they kill a shackful of men. From a burning barn, nearby, gallops a horse on fire. Civilized society, whatever that may be, is many leagues away, and some of the images that follow, in the next two hours, tack between the nasty and the tragic—between the sleeping Eli being bitten by a spider inside his mouth, for instance, and a night sky so deeply bruised and empurpled that we could be staring at a Rothko.

Nevertheless, even as the Commodore dispatches a fresh batch of assailants, we get an extraordinary sense, welling up in the main characters, that being felled by unnatural causes might not be the only way to die. “My life is an empty cylinder,” Morris declares, and he means to fill it. Warm, for his part, talks of a utopian community that will concentrate on true democracy and “spiritual development.” (The plan is to base it in Dallas. Hmm.) These are bewildering prospects, to say the least, for anyone appearing in—or watching—a Western. Violence should be met with violence, whether in a street gang or beside a secluded stream: that is the lesson bequeathed to generations of moviegoers, and maybe it takes a foreign director, now and then, to suggest otherwise. Ford, I suspect, would have scoffed at the ending of “The Sisters Brothers,” and so would Anthony Mann, who, at the climax of his gold-rush drama, “ The Far Country ” (1955), makes sure that the hero (James Stewart), having been shot in the arm, removes his sling for the purge of the final showdown. No such return to the fray for Audiard’s amputee; he lifts his arm to aim, but it just ain’t there. As for the film’s conclusion, I will say only that it stirred me even more than it surprised me. Once the possibilities of mayhem have been exhausted, it’s time to give peace a chance.

What is hard to work out, in regard to “Bel Canto,” is who should really have made it. Buñuel? Mel Brooks? Or would it have suited the Marx Brothers, as a coda to “A Night at the Opera”? How about a role for Steven Seagal?

The actual director is Paul Weitz, who, together with Anthony Weintraub, adapted the script from Ann Patchett’s prize-winning novel. We are in a nameless but volatile Latin-American land, at the home of the Vice-President, who is hosting the most rarefied of soirées. Many nationalities are represented, and the company includes a visiting Japanese industrialist (Ken Watanabe) and the French Ambassador (Christopher Lambert). The guest of honor is Roxane Coss (Julianne Moore), a famed American soprano, who has kindly consented to perform, for a sizable fee. Mid-aria, however, she is interrupted by a squad of gun-waving guerrillas. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

I was afraid that the terrorists, who are without mercy, might force Roxane to sing something by Andrew Lloyd Webber, so it comes as a relief when they merely demand the release of all political prisoners. Later, however, the diva stands on a balcony and, spurning the offer of a megaphone, serenades the watching world with a tremulous burst of Puccini. “When they hear the beauty of your voice, these government criminals, perhaps they will find a solution to our situation,” the rebel leader says. Ah, yes, cultural diplomacy; think of all the hijackings that have been brought to a bloodless end by a snatch of “La Bohème.” Meanwhile, the narrative staggers on, enlivened only by the hovering threat of kitsch and the musical dubbing. Moore, like an upmarket version of Lina Lamont, in “Singin’ in the Rain,” lip-synchs convincingly to the sound of Renée Fleming. But not quite convincingly enough. ♦

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By Richard Brody

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Danger arias

Bel Canto Ann Patchett 318pp, Fourth Estate, £10

Transfixed by the hijack of the Japanese embassy in Lima five years ago, Ann Patchett decided that it lacked one thing - an opera singer. In this ensuing rendition of life under siege, she corrects the deficit, but although her version of real-life events is frequently fantastical and defiantly romantic, the playfulness of artistic licence doesn't lead to a novel as light-hearted as its setup suggests.

World-famous soprano Roxane Coss has been tempted to a small Latin American country against her better judgment, the lure of big bucks obscuring her characteristic fastidiousness. She herself is the bait for an even bigger fish: opera fanatic Katsumi Hosokawa, founder and president of a cash-rich electronics company, for whom the "host country" (as it is always described) is throwing a birthday party in the hope of attracting investment. As Roxane's final aria concludes, the lights in the vice-president's palatial home flicker and die, and terrorists swarm over the black-tie clad, turbot-eating dignitaries. As overtures to novels go, this one is pretty electrifying.

Like that of her heroine, Patchett's great talent in Bel Canto is one of range. With bravura confidence and inventiveness she varies her pace to encompass both lightning flashes of brutality and terror and long stretches of incarcerated ennui. The novel's sensibilities extend from the sly wit of observational humour to subtle, mournful insights into the nature of yearning and desire. Like the blueprint of operatic performance that she has imported, Patchett slides from strutting camp to high tragedy, minute social comedy to sublime romanticism.

After an initial period fraught with tension and danger - including an extraordinary description of the lingering death of Roxane's diabetic accompanist - the kidnapped household soon develops its own more peaceful rhythms. The terrorists have failed in their mission before they've even begun: their real target, the country's Japanese-born president, had stayed home on the crucial night; ostensibly to attend to "matters of Israel", actually to watch his favourite soap opera. Soon the kidnappers themselves, enchanted by the grandeur of their surroundings, are also hooked on the TV drama, fitting their half-hearted drills around it or wandering through the house eating pistachio nuts and sniffing hand lotion.

Deprived of their intended prize, the revolutionary generals are revealed as men without a plan, their only remaining chance the continuing abduction of the soprano. Soon they find themselves running around to satisfy her every whim, procuring for her dental floss, a muffler, herbal throat lozenges. Holding them to ransom with the threat of non-performance, Roxane demands score after score, and thereafter works another spell on the household, trilling arias for hours on end.

The trick is ingenious: a hijack in which the captors have nowhere to go and the hostages have no desire for release. For Mr Hosokawa, proximity to his idol is a dream come true, surpassed when they begin a tentative relationship; for his loyal translator Gen, captivity is also unexpectedly liberating. The only polyglot present, he must attend to translations both major and minor almost all the time; voicing the captors' demands and the captives' physical and emotional needs to one another, he finds his role as communicator similar to Roxane's. And in the quiet darkness of a china cupboard, he also finds romantic fulfilment in the arms of a terrorist aptly named Carmen.

If Roxane and Mr Hosokawa, Gen and Carmen are the novel's premier cast, they are superbly supported by the rest of the ensemble. Patchett's stereotypical foreigners evoke humour rather than glibness: the uxorious Frenchman, Simon Thibault, weeping into his wife's stole; the Swiss hostage negotiator dressed in suit and tie, looking "very much like an earnest representative of an American religion"; the chain-smoking Russian, Fyodorov, regaling Roxane with mournful and meandering childhood stories and unrequited love. In the becalmed sections of her narrative, Patchett has the space and capacity to animate each of these lives and more, and the deftness to tuck them neatly into the story as a whole.

Opera demands a tragic ending, and Bel Canto draws inexorably to a conclusion that neither captors nor captives foresee or desire. Outside, in a real world to which we are never admitted, a megaphone threatens to drown out Roxane's exquisite singing with a voice that from the very beginning "raged, loud and distorted as if it had bubbled up from the ocean floor". Throughout, allusions to the future cleverly keep individual fates mysterious; we know there will be a "later", but are denied the knowledge of who will live to see it.

At the start of the novel, Roxane is singing, at Mr Hosokawa's request, the aria from Dvorák's Rusalka, in which a mermaid falls in love with a mortal. If she herself becomes mortal, then she loses her power of speech and becomes instead a spirit of death. The opera takes place on the border between spring and summer, and in the novel too the captives live through the drizzly, misty days of the garua , which renders the passage of time irrelevant. When the garua lifts, so must Roxane's spell, and then the novel will end. Whom the spirit of death alights upon is concealed until the penultimate chapter, and when it is revealed, the narrative returns to a shocking brutality. If the bathetic conclusion of the epilogue disappoints, it is unsurprising but nonetheless lamentable. The house's bemused inmates are not alone in hoping that the spell would never end.

• Ann Patchett

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Julianne Moore brings high culture to tense hostage-crisis drama Bel Canto : EW review

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

“It’s opera, so in the end everybody dies,” soprano Roxanne Coss (Julianne Moore) confides off-handedly to a guest, before stepping into the drawing room of a politician’s stately home to deliver a private performance for a small gathering of global elites and a few awed waitstaff.

Death definitely comes for the low-simmering Bel Canto , based on Ann Patchett’s acclaimed 2001 novel, though not in the form of conquistadors or pirates or consumption in a Paris garret. Instead it’s geopolitics: a resistance movement desperate enough to turn to militance by crashing a vice president’s party with machine guns and an impossible list of demands.

What they don’t know is that the president they’ve come to speak to isn’t even there; he’s home watching his telenovelas. Which means the only leverage they have is these lesser citizens, and as much time as it takes for the powers that be to respond.

No one is thrilled to suddenly be trapped in the dinner party from hell, least of all Roxanne. She didn’t even mean to be in this fancy house in this unnamed Latin American country in the first place; she’s only agreed to come because she’s being paid a very large fee to sing specifically for Katsumi Hosokawa (Ken Watanabe), a Tokyo mogul the local government is hoping to woo to build a factory in their troubled city.

Director Paul Weitz is mostly known for lighter, more observational stories like About a Boy and Mozart in the Jungle , and the strongest moments in Bel Canto are the small ones. The broader situation outside the house’s walls is never explained in any real detail, mostly because it doesn’t need to be.

Instead, as captivity stretches from days into weeks, the narrative becomes about all the little human dramas happening inside: the unlikely attractions that form and the tentative gestures of friendship; the way a curious rebel lifts a bedspread to his nose to sniff the silk or a silver-haired hostage teaches one of his young captors how to get a closer shave.

Mostly, it’s a study in class acting: Moore’s Coss is a diva onstage and off, imperious but lonely; Watanabe’s Hosokawa is an old-world gentleman, smart enough to know how bad their mess is, and the part men like him play in it; Tenoch Huerta ( Sin Nombre ) is stubborn and soulful as the rebel leader, and Ryo Kase and Maria Mercedes Coroy, as the translator and soldier quietly building a bridge between their language barriers, are the movie’s cross-cultural Romeo and Juliet.

Nothing much happens for a long time, until it does: The lull of the middle leads to a sudden, wrenching climax before dissolving into a clumsy postscript (though to be fair, the rewrite here might be better than the left-field swerve the book takes). It’s too bad Weitz chose to keep a coda at all; in those penultimate scenes, he’s already struck Bel Canto ‘s best notes. B

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6 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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Our recommended books this week include two satirical novels — one about identity politics and victimization, the other about artificial intelligence and gender roles — along with Tana French’s second crime novel about a Chicago police officer who retired to the Irish countryside. In nonfiction, we recommend the story of a deadly avalanche, a philosopher’s exploration of the concept of giving up, and the gratifyingly intimate audio version of Barbra Streisand’s recent memoir, which she narrates herself. Happy listening, and happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

MY NAME IS BARBRA Barbra Streisand

Certain of the, shall we say, eccentricities (oh … the ellipses!) in Streisand’s 992-page doorstop of a memoir get wonderfully ironed out in audio form. Its sprawling a-star-is-born anecdotes seem to find their natural form in the towering performer’s 48-plus hours of discursive, disarming and often gloriously off-the-cuff narration.

“As Streisand recites the story of her life … she ad-libs off the written text, splices sentences, audibly shakes her head at dubious decisions, and altogether places us opposite her on the sofa with a cup of coffee for a two-day kibitz.”

From Zachary Woolfe’s review

Penguin Audio | 48 hours, 17 minutes

VICTIM Andrew Boryga

Boryga’s debut is a lively social satire about the fetishization of victimhood, following a young working-class student, Javi, who uses exaggerated stories of tragedy to earn attention and success. Boryga is having fun, and he’s inviting us to join in.

“Let’s be clear: Though Boryga is playing, he’s not playing around. Through Javi’s story, Boryga humorously and scathingly calls out the gluttonous consumption of stories of victimhood.”

From Mateo Askaripour’s review

Doubleday | $27

ANNIE BOT Sierra Greer

On the surface, “Annie Bot” is a story about an A.I. sex robot that grows more and more sentient, but underneath this high-tech premise is a sharp and smart exploration of misogyny, toxic masculinity, selfhood and self-determination.

“A brilliant pas de deux, grappling with ideas of freedom and identity while depicting a perverse relationship in painful detail.”

From Lydia Kiesling’s review

Mariner | $28

ON GIVING UP Adam Phillips

In his latest book, Phillips’s exploration of “giving up” covers the vast territory between hope and despair. We can give up smoking, sugar or a bad habit; but we can also give up on ourselves. Phillips proposes curiosity and improvisation as antidotes to absolute certainty.

“Phillips doesn’t try to prevent us from thinking whatever it is that we want to think; what he does is repeatedly coax us to ask if that’s what we really believe, and how we can be sure.”

From Jennifer Szalai’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $26

THE DARKEST WHITE: A Mountain Legend and the Avalanche That Took Him Eric Blehm

In January 2003, seven skiers and snowboarders were killed in an avalanche on a glacier in western Canada. Among them was the American snowboarder Craig Kelly, and the adventure writer Blehm turns this page-turner not just into a biography of the athlete, but a tribute to the sport itself: addictive, thrilling — sometimes deadly.

“Probably the most unremittingly exciting book of nonfiction I have come across in years. I found myself reading late into recent nights wholly transfixed by every paragraph, every word.”

From Simon Winchester’s review

Harper | $32

THE HUNTER Tana French

For Tana French fans, every one of the thriller writer’s twisty, ingenious books is an event. This one, a sequel to “The Searcher,” once again sees the retired Chicago cop Cal Hooper, a perennial outsider in the Irish west-country hamlet of Ardnakelty, caught up in the crimes — seen and unseen — that eat at the seemingly picturesque village.

“The novel’s greatest pleasures — genuine twists aside — reside in the specific intersection of outsider and native, and particularly the former’s determined need to idealize, to claim, to tint whole rivers green.”

From Sadie Stein’s review

Viking | $32

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