Bel Canto - Ann Patchett

As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.

I made reference to this Michael Dirda quote in my last post, and yesterday I lived it when I finished Bel Canto. If you've read it, you know that the ending, though not a surprise, comes down forcefully. Battered is exactly how I feel, and I can't quite bring myself back to fiction right now, even stuff I've already got in progress.

Synopsis: In a bid to attract industrial investment, a nameless South American country hosts a 53rd birthday party for one Mr. Hosokawa, Japanese opera afficionado and president of a Sony-doppleganger. To persuade him to accept the invitation, they invite his favorite soprano to perform. At the end of her performance, a troupe of terrorists emerges from the HVAC system to kidnap the host country's president. Unfortunately, the president had skipped the party to watch his favorite soap opera, so the terrorists find themselves with a few hundred surprise international hostages of the slightly- to moderately-powerful variety.

Any reader who wasn't born yesterday knows that untenable hostage situations just don't end well. And it's the dread birthed by this knowledge, in constant contrast with the transcendence of beauty that permeates the story, that tears at the soul.