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.

Book by Book - Michael Dirda

Few have lived life more fully in the company of books than longtime critic Michael Dirda. In this book he takes pause and reflects on the lessons learned from a lifetime of reading "to feel at home in the world, which meant to know something of the best that has been thought, believed and created by the great minds of the past and present."

Dirda looks back into his internal library for insights on learning, work, leisure, love, family and spirit. His ability to connect ideas and draw together themes between widely differing writings and writers is a testament to his breadth of experience and literary intake. The book is full of quotations, allusions, and recommendations.

Dirda is the kind of critic I aspire to be, and often find myself reading his work almost devotionally. I'm struggling to create a synopsis of this one, and want to get my own copy and live with this book a bit more, but here are some excerpts.

xiv - Great fiction, in particular, eschews the reductionist and obviously didactic, instead reveling in the complication, pointing out options, at most revealing the consequences of one course over another. Contradiction, not consistency, second thoughts, rather than dogmatic certitude, lie at the heart of humane understanding, and all those who try to simplify experience usually only succeed in narrowing it.

24 – An unfulfilled vocation drains the color form a man’s entire existence. – Honore de Balzac

37 – The practice of “reviewing” has nothing to do with the art of criticism. – Henry James.

54 – The poet Ezra Pound, interred at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the insane, once told the critic Hugh Kenner, “Sometimes the guards come to me, for a piece of verse to give their sweethearts.” “And do you write it?” asked Kenner. “Oh, yes,” answered Pound.

117 – (On cheap genre fiction): …the kind of prose only an engineer could love.

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

127 – The most typical character flaw of the bookish is the desire to show off.

131 – Originality does not consist in saying what no one else has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself. – Leslie Stephen

135 – Philosophy, wrote G.K. Chesterton, “is not the concern of those who pas through Divinity and Greats, but of those who pass through birth and death. If the ordinary man may not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it?

98 - To interest is the first duty of art; no other excellencies will ever begin to compensate for the failure of this, and very serious faults will be covered by this, as by charity. – C.S. Lewis