Bel Canto(106)
The biggest achievement of this book for me, the thing that I am most proud of, is the narrative structure — that kind of third person narrative that I think of as Russian, wherein the point of view just seamlessly moves among the characters. That was the hardest part of writing the book. It was what took me so long. It’s the thing I’ve wanted to do since I started writing fiction.
SA: That makes a lot of sense, because Gen as narrator would have seriously unbalanced a story about the finding of friendship and love, I think. Much of Bel Canto is dedicated to his learning to translate these emotions for himself. Take Fyodorov’s declaration of love for Roxane: it had the wonderful effect of thrusting Gen into the professional role that Roxane occupies — that is, professing emotion, not just processing information. It’s an interesting reversal of that Rusalka passage, because here Gen must confront the fact that while he knows what he’s saying, he understands how to communicate the emotion of what he’s saying about as well as Roxane understands Czech. It’s also a useful prelude to what is, finally, a surprise in the epilogue. But let me ask you, because these matters of meaning and interpretation seem so well funded — does your interest in translation stem from your own experiences? Do you speak or read any other languages?
AP: Well here you go, there’s the really penetrating and embarrassing question.
SA: Withdrawn!
AP: No, no — because something this book grows out of is my enormous shame of not speaking any other languages. I can do a hotel and restaurant French, and a hotel and restaurant Italian, but I don’t have another language and it’s something that I really, really dislike about myself. And of course the other thing is that I have no talent or training at all in music —
SA: I was going to ask that next.
AP: I think of these qualities as being two great measures of what it means to be a cultured person, and I completely dropped the ball on both of them. Truly, the writing of this story comes out of that shame, and wanting to examine it and make peace with it.
There are all sorts of things that I set up for myself to do when I write a novel. But in the end they don’t have anything to do with the story. That was one — coming to terms with my musical and foreign language deficits, and the other one, which is more important, was to try to find a way to grieve for the things that you read about in the newspaper. Because once we get into these big numbers — plane crashes, earthquakes and typhoons, hostage situations and school shootings — we see it and we experience it for a second and then we abstract it. It’s too far away, or there are too many people, or it’s not a circumstance we could ever be involved in. And so, as we were discussing earlier, we forget all about it.
But I was so moved by the Japanese embassy story and it took place over such a long period of time that I really got to think about what was happening there. When the guerillas were all shot I really did want to experience it. I wanted to find a way to take some time to feel bad about that loss. I’ll never know what really happened. I can be pretty sure it bore little resemblance to what I heard on the news. Still, I wanted to find a way to experience it, to take emotional responsibility for it. On a moral level. To be able to say there’s been a real loss and I need to stop and grieve for these people.
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About the Author
ANN PATCHETT is the author of three previous novels, The Patron Saint of Liars, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Taft, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize; and The Magician’s Assistant. She has written for many publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Village Voice, GQ, Paris Review, and Vogue. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.