Bel Canto(105)

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 Lima led you to opera and to this book. But it seems appropriate, because a central 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 United States: let’s see — Kentucky [The Patron Saint of Liars, 1992]; Memphis [Taft, 1994]; and L.A. [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 South America for Bel Canto. But, let’s be honest — it’s not an especially bold or insightful rendering of South America. 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 Dvo?ák 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 U.K. editor at Fourth Estate]. Christopher 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 U.K. and that they [Fourth Estate] 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 Czech. They had no idea what they 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.

SA: Well, that’s what being a writer is all about.

AP: Yes, absolutely. [Laughter]

SA: Unlike some authors I’ve known, who basically want their publisher to operate like a kind of souped-up Kinko’s, you seem to really enjoy the give-and-take of the editorial process.

AP: It’s very important. My friend Elizabeth McCracken, who is completely invested in my fiction as I am invested in hers, edits my books for me. She’s the only person who reads my work while I’m writing it and I take whatever she has to say very seriously. Originally the book had a first person prologue and a first person epilogue, both by Gen — which then implied that the whole book was written by Gen. The basic theme of the prologue was, “This is the story of how I met my wife.” Elizabeth told me to get rid of the prologue. What she told me, and I think this is absolutely right, was that I had a fear about pulling off the third person narration, so I had stuck in a first person prologue so that I could say, “What looks like a third person narrative really is not.”