Retreat

Thanks to everyone for all the comments (and emails) recently; collectively, you're helping to write an article whose goal is to help explain to the uninitiated why law students blog and what good might come of it for both writers and readers. This post explains more; all thoughts still very welcome and appreciated. If you email, please let me know if you'd prefer your thoughts not be quoted in the article. If you post a comment, it's already public, so I'll assume you don't mind if it's published elsewhere. If this assumption is incorrect, please let me know that, as well.

Meanwhile, ai will be quiet (from my end, anyway) for a couple of days while I "retreat" to the Maryland woods with my fellow summer interns and the attorneys we're working with. Much reading (for me, probably Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood, upon L's strong recommendation) card-playing, and swimming is promised.

Have a great weekend!

Posted 08:47 AM | Comments (1) | meta-blogging

Bel Canto: Opera Will Save Us

In the ongoing project to catch up on long-overdue reading, last weekend I finished Bel Canto after two weeks of trying. My progress through the book was slowed in the second week by the fact that I began commuting to work by bike rather than by train, removing 1-2 hours of reading time from my workdays. However, I found the book to be very slow and not very compelling until about page 275 (of approx. 325 pages). That's my quick review: Very slow and overwrought for the first 3/4 or more, followed by 30-50 pages of rising action, all of which comes to a chain-yanking conclusion in the final 5 pages. In other words, after reading this book, I felt a little used. I read 275 pages of overwrought description only to be kicked in the stomach and patted on the head in the end?

(If you haven't read the book but would like to, don't read on—spoilers ahead.)

Plot summary: Group of international business and governmental elites gathers at the home of the Vice President of an unnamed "developing" nation to celebrate the birthday of the CEO of a multinational Japanese electronics corporation by listening to a private performance of Roxanne Coss, one of the world's most famous and accomplished opera sopranos. At the end of the performance, the house is invaded by approximately 20 "terrorists" who have come to kidnap the president of this developing nation, only to find the president couldn't make it to the party because he didn't want to miss his favorite television soap opera. (Apparently, the president has never heard of a VCR.) Instead of kidnapping the president, the "terrorists" decide to hold the whole room hostage; they soon relent and set free all the women, sick and old men, and house workers (the "terrorists" claim their goal is to liberate "the workers"; the 3rd-person narrator wonders what they mean by "liberate" and "workers," but never returns to these questions—this is one of the book's great flaws).

Skip ahead two weeks and the "terrorists" and hostages have settled into routines and begun to make friends with each other. They sit around, waiting for something to happen, and have lots of time to think about whatever the author, Ann Patchett, wants to put into their heads. This could be interesting, but mostly isn't since the thoughts Patchett chooses to catalog are mostly trivialities along the lines of, "gee, I really do care about my wife" (from an elite european hostage). Some of the thoughts are slightly more interesting. For example, the Vice President of the developing nation is a hostage and we learn that he grew up in something like poverty and never dreamt he'd ever live in a house that had a machine in the kitchen dedicated solely to making ice. He also becomes obsessed with maintaining this house and begins taking over the cooking and cleaning and gardening that he'd previously paid servants to do for him. The Vice President's discovery of all the work his servants had done for him—all the labor he'd taken for granted that had made his life so nice—is a highlight of the book. If more characters had had epiphanies like this, the book would have been much more impressive. But even the Vice President doesn't do much with his newfound knowledge; he doesn't even express thanks (that I recall) for the labor his servants have always done, but instead becomes obsessed with doing it himself in order to maintain his material possessions in the best possible manner. So instead of readers getting a character who develops some consciousness of the economic inequalities of his world, we get a character who obsessed and controlled by his material possessions. Yawn.

After 4.5 months (and a couple hundred pages) of this, a few characters have fallen in love and everyone is captivated by the singing of the famous Soprano. This singing—opera, of all things—is what seems to bring everyone together; it's what set the scene in motion (the reason everyone was in this house in the first place), and what makes everyone look forward to their next day as a hostage or "terrorist" in this little drama. In this way the book is highly romantic, preaching an ideal of Western European culture as a sort of universal language that can soften even the hardened hearts of "terrorists." This music makes language irrelevant—the fact that the songs the soprano sings are in languages neither she nor her listeners understand does not matter because the music touches them all and never fails to put them into a dreamy state of bliss. The book verges on magical realism in this regard, but it doesn't quite go that far. Perhaps it should have.

The relationships between the hostages and the "terrorists" seem to raise some sort of argument about how we're all just people and no matter how deep our political differences, we can all get along quite well if we try (and, um, if we can just unite around the universal language of Western European music!). This could also be a redeeming theme of the book, but its execution here comes off as too simplistic to be more than a superficial gesture, a la Rodney King's plea, "Can't we all just get along?"

In the end... Well, I won't tell you the end because that's really the only reason to read the book, but for me it ended up not seeming like a very good reason. In fact, at the end of the book, I felt a little used, like I'd been tricked. I read all of this, for that? But rather than ruining it completely for those who've not yet read the novel, suffice to say the ending returns to the book's central theme that Western European culture, and specifically opera, is the only thing that can make this crazy world tolerable for civilized people. One of the main characters summarizes that theme in his final lines (speaking of Roxanne, the Soprano):

When I hear Roxane sing I am still able to think well of the world," Gen said. "This is a world in which someone could have written such music, a world in which she can still sing that music with so much compassion. That's proof of something, isn't it? I don't think I would last a day without that now."

Oh yes, opera makes life worth living. If the book were written differently, it might be possible to read this as a larger argument that, rather than building armies and trying to resolve conflicts with bullets, we'd be better off trying to encourage art and artistic expression around the world. That argument might have potential, but it's not really in this book. The novel sets up a situation—a sort of microcosm of "globalization"—where the characters could gain some real insight into their own lives and the larger world they live in; it does an excellent job of setting a scene where these potentially fascinating characters could experience real growth. But instead of allowing them to grow or learn at all, the novel spends far too much time talking about the magical powers of opera, making its characters little more than a passive audience for the beautiful music.

Why do the "terrorists" want to kidnap a president? As mentioned above, we don't know, and the book belittles the "terrorists" by making them seem like they don't really know, either. Would a small group of "terrorists" attempt a kidnapping like this without good and deeply-believed reasons? No. But the book never explores any of that, nor does it explore the possible participation of its hostages—these global business and governmental elites—in whatever events or injustices the "terrorists" might be be trying to address. Instead, the novel seems to assume its readers won't care about these things, because the music is what's important. Who cares what motivates "terrorists"? Play that beautiful opera, please!

Bel Canto won the "Orange Prize"* and the Pen Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The only explanation I can see for so much critical adulation is that the critical establishment is a sucker for romantic peans to European culture. Perhaps after Sept. 11, 2001 (the book was published in 2001, so I assume many critics were reading it in the context of that day's aftermath), many critics also enjoyed a novel that didn't ask them to think too deeply, if at all, about what might motivate a "terrorist," or about their own relationship to those motivations. There will always be an audience for escapist fantasy, I suppose, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that. I only found the book disappointing because its characters and setting suggest it's going to be much more than the "fantasia of guns and Puccini and Red Cross negotiations" promised by the book jacket blurb (from The New Yorker). But no, a fantasia is exactly what it is.

* Side note: congratulations to Andrea Levy, the winner of the Orange Prize for 2004 for her novel, Small Island.

Posted 08:30 AM | Comments (2) | ai books