Summary
In Bel Canto, a group of high ranking diplomats, government officials, and businessmen gather over a fine dinner to hear a private performance by the great soprano, Roxane Coss. The government has hired Coss for a high price in order to try to lure the Japanese businessman Katsumi Hosokawa into investing in their country.
A group of young revolutionaries has infiltrated the home of the president of the unnamed country, where Coss is singing. Unable to take the president hostage, because he is not there, they take everyone else prisoner.
At first, the two groups, members of the privileged, upper class international elite, and poor, barely educated young revolutionaries, are frightened and wary of each other. The revolutionaries, who have the guns and the upper hand, are particularly terrifying, and the party goers, who have to hover on the floor, fear they will be killed.
But as the hostage situation continues on and on at an impasse, the two groups start to get to know each other and to become human beings to one another. Coss and Hosokawa fall in love and have an affair, despite their language barrier. Hosokawa's translator, Gen, and a young revolutionary named Carmen also fall in love. An almost idyllic community begins to form between captors and captive as everyone starts to relax and trust one another a little more. The revolutionaries, for example, allow the people cooking to use knives. Captives are allowed to use the garden.
But just as if it seems as though the world will become a better place through the relationships being built between rich and poor in the president's home, troops storm the place and kill the revolutionaries, as well as Hosokawa. Although the narrator foretells from the beginning that the hostage crisis will end badly, it nevertheless comes as a shock to the reader. The book encourages us to dwell on the fact that we may have more uniting us as humans than separating us, and shows that even members of groups with great differences can find grounds for love and community.
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