Ann Patchett (49 page)
Authors: Bel Canto
AP:
Small details, tiny things. For example,
Beatrice complains at some point that she wants to be outside again, walking
down the street and having men honk their horns at her. That I picked up there
— not because anyone was honking at me, of course! [Laughs] But when a young
woman walks down the street in
every man who drives by toots the horn at her. Two taps, three taps: it’s a
kind of Morse code of attractiveness. Those are the kinds of things you pick
up, the little cultural nuances.
SA:
Like the soap operas. There’s something about
that Latin American passion for soap operas. I loved that early scene of the
President sitting on the edge of the bed, watching his soap.
AP:
You know, that detail is true: [former
Peruvian President Alberto] Fujimori was obsessed with soap operas and wouldn’t
hold meetings during a broadcast.
SA:
Was he supposed to have been present at that
party at the Japanese embassy and cancelled because of a soap opera, or is that
your embellishment?
AP:
That’s my embellishment, but he did have a big
soap opera problem.
SA:
So what were the guerillas doing in that
embassy? What was their goal, do we know?
AP:
Their goal was to free their jailed comrades
but also to draw attention to the Peruvian prison system, which is as brutal
and inhumane as they come. They basically bury people alive in these mountain
prisons. The cells are dug into the mountains along a network of tunnels —
little rooms you can’t stand up in.
They’re truly, truly horrible.
SA:
A fact brought to the fore again recently by
the Berenson case. [American Lori Berenson, then twenty-six, was convicted in
1996 by a secret military court of conspiring with the Tupac Amaru
Revolutionary Movement to attack
prison was voided by a military court in August of 2000 and a new civil trial
of the case commenced in March of 2001.]
AP:
Exactly. And so their goal was to call
attention to that. Now, I don’t want to seem to be sympathetic to people who
take others hostage, but I think these people had a pretty solid argument.
SA:
The Vice President’s house in your book, by
contrast, is precisely not a hellhole. It’s a place of refuge where the best
human qualities may blossom. Apropos of that, let me just read aloud this
lovely epigraph you chose from
The Magic Flute
,
which, come to think of it, is also a kind of hostage drama.
AP:
I love those lines.
Go ahead.
SA:
Speaker: Stranger, what do you seek or ask
from us?
Tamino: Friendship and love.
Speaker: And are you prepared even if it costs
you your life?
Tamino: I am.
AP:
Do you want to weep?
SA:
Yeah, but also let me just take off my
editor’s eyeshade and place it over my heart, because it’s so rare that you get
an epigraph that’s right on the money like that — one you can flip back to
having just finished the book and say, “Oh, perfect!”
AP:
I’ve always thought an epigraph an example of
really good writing followed by an example of often really mediocre writing.
[Laughter]
SA:
Look, if we start to think that way here we’ll
all be out of work very soon. [Laughter] But, friendship and love: You evoke
these in
Bel Canto
, you create this ideal society,
and with it you make us confront the enormous problems that come with the
creation of an ideal society. It’s a society that came into being at gunpoint,
organized itself around opera, chess, and French cooking, and so is such a
massive contradiction that it cannot possibly survive — and does not. It
presents a rather large political and philosophical problem, doesn’t it?
AP:
I think that the problem is twofold: One, the
guerillas end up saving the people they don’t care about saving. If you’re
thinking in terms of some sort of spiritual salvation, they’re taking the
wealthiest people and somehow redirecting their lives towards the better, which
was not the Generals’ intention. At the same time they’re taking these very
poor children and saving them through exposure to the kinds of things that come
with wealth and luxury. All the Generals really know is that they want
something to be different and something to be better. But they really haven’t
thought it out beyond that. And so what they get is not what they had vaguely
formulated in their minds. They get something different and they get something
better, but it is a passage into a world that is tied to the very materialism
that is of course bringing down “their people.”
SA:
Right,
and it’s this
that the people end up praying for. Here’s a passage about Carmen at the end of
chapter five: “Yes, the Generals wanted something better for the people, but
weren’t they [the guerillas] the people? Would it be the worst thing in the
world if nothing happened at all, if they all stayed together in this generous
house? Carmen prayed hard. . . . What she prayed for was
nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their
existence and leave them alone.”
A romantic dream about a
beautiful world that cannot possibly be sustained.
AP:
Right.
SA:
Opera, of course, is also a beautiful world
that can’t be sustained, which is probably why people become so nutty about it.
Mr. Hosokawa is such a nut. At the risk of being brusque, but to come right out
with it, since you did write this book,
Bel Canto
,
where do you fall on the opera nut scale?
AP:
I’m not one, but I used to have a boyfriend
who was an opera nut. He was once a Canadian quiz kid and he had memorized the
Grove Encyclopedia of Opera
by the time he was eight. He
knew everything in the world about opera. In the years that we were together he
played opera all the time and I would walk into the room and think, Oh that’s
nice. [Laughs] We never talked about it. Probably something lodged in my brain
during those years, but I kick myself that I never did the work to figure it
all out when the quiz kid was at my disposal. Years later, when I was watching
this [Peruvian hostage] story unfolding on the news it seemed so much like an
opera to me.
Though at that point in my life I had never been
to an opera.
SA:
No!
AP:
Yeah.
SA:
Wow.
AP:
But I was watching this and I thought,
What
this tragedy needs is an opera singer. I started
constructing my plot, and then I set about learning opera. What I discovered
was that I really genuinely love opera.
SA:
How did this wanting to figure it all out
influence the writing of the book?
AP:
Very simply, if Roxane was singing something
in a given scene I would put the aria on and have it play ten times over. I
would try to write the moment as I was listening to it.
I became hugely,
hugely interested in opera.
SA:
What an amazing story. And to think that this
ugly episode in
theme of
Bel Canto
is the bringing together of
people into a community who would otherwise have had nothing to do with each
other.
AP:
Right.
SA:
Let’s talk about the language
problem,
because of course only pockets of people can actually
speak directly to one another in the book. Everything else has to go through
this extraordinary fellow, Gen [SA pronounces this
Jen
],
the translator.
AP:
Which is actually Gen [hard
G
].
SA:
Oh.
AP:
No one [who has read the book] has said
Gen
; everyone says
Jen
.
SA:
Yeah, why do we do that?
AP:
I named this character after someone I know,
Gen Watanabe, because Gen Watanabe is the Japanese equivalent of John Smith. Gen
told me right from the start, “The only problem with using my name is that everyone
will say Jen.” I don’t know what I’m going to do when I have to give a reading
from this book. I don’t know how to pronounce many of the names of these
characters.
SA:
Uh oh! But on that note, let’s pause to
consider that till now your books have been set in the
The Patron Saint of Liars
, 1992];
Taft
, 1994]; and
The Magician’s
Assistant
, 1997]. What’s it like as a novelist to radically shift
coordinates like this?
AP:
Well, you might notice that
Bel Canto
takes place largely inside a living room
[laughs], so it doesn’t matter at all, really, where the book is set. But I
will say that my books are inspired by my books. There can be something that
I’ll get into in a minor way in one book and then I’ll think that I want to
open it up some more later on.
The Magician’s Assistant
was a book about people who were all from someplace else, trying to assimilate
in some sense. I was very interested in that theme and I thought I’d like to do
a lot more with it in my next book. So that was part of the reason that I got
to
Bel
Canto
. But, let’s be honest — it’s not an especially bold or insightful
rendering of
It’s about
a living room in South America. [Laughs]
SA:
Getting back to translation: of course,
translation is the biggest problem in opera. We were talking about the English
National Opera the other day.
AP:
Right.
SA:
Which has this ridiculous
policy that everything must be sung in English.
I saw a production of
Parsifal
there in 1986. ENO’s tenor was sick so they flew
in Siegfried Jerusalem to sing Parsifal, and of course he could sing the part
in his sleep, but in German. So he’s singing away in German and everyone else
is singing in English. And — no surprise — they were equally unintelligible.
To my ears, anyway.
AP:
Right.
SA:
Now, in this passage early in chapter six you
reveal that the singers are sometimes totally ignorant of what they are
singing: Roxane sings
Rusalka
beautifully, of
course, but Gen — who speaks Czech — is aware that she “did not know a word of
Czechoslovakian. She sang the passage of every syllable, but none of the
syllables actually managed to form into recognizable words of the language. It
was quite obvious that she had memorized the work phonetically, that she sang
her love for Dvořák and her love for the translated story, but that the Czech
language itself was a stranger which passed her by without a moment’s
recognition.”
Beautiful! Now we know!
AP:
I appreciate the compliment but the story’s
not mine. That came from Christopher Potter [AP’s
was one of the first people to read this book when I was finished with it. He’s
the greatest opera buff in the world. I told Christopher that I wouldn’t send
the book to any other publisher in the
could pay me whatever they felt like paying me in return for his editing the
book for opera.
SA:
What
a deal.
AP:
The deal was all
mine
.
He was great. He took out a lot of — I’m not a sentimental person but there
were probably twenty sappy lines in the book and Christopher took them all out.
I was so embarrassed when I got the manuscript back to see he had drawn lines
through these really emotional, corny things I had written about music. But the
whole thing about
Rusalka
was his. He’d gone to see
Rusalka
with some friends, one of whom was Czech, and they
came out raving about how great it was and the Czech friend said of the
singers, “Yeah, but they couldn’t speak
were singing.” That’s the kind of thing that I never would have come up with on
my own and I feel so fortunate to have been able to steal if off somebody else.