bel canto.

it’s not the book i thought it would be at the beginning. i love it all, but the roughest chapter is clearly the first one. what she’s setting up is not what you think she is setting up. nino’s reading it right now, and she was like “what’s with the political motivations, is it really as simple as stealing the president?” and i couldn’t say anything, because oh is that not the story ann patchett wants to tell. it has very little to do with political implications.

i actually got to the second to last chapter and stopped for a bit. i didn’t want it to end. i just wanted the leave the characters there, where they were. but then i had to finish it and know how it ended.

i love ann patchett eternally now. she has won my love. i would follow her to the ends of the earth i think.

it made me want to go listen to opera. but also the way she describes the opera is pretty much the same way i feel about amazing musical theater singers. it’s the same sort of beauty i think.

i do have this one paragraph which keeps haunting me, which could also be subtitled break my heart ann patchett;

her skin, the night, the grass, to be outside and then to be inside carmen.

he doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this. at the very moment he could have been taking her far away, he is pulling her closer. her hair is tangled around his neck. on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more. his fingers slip into the soft indentations between her ribs, the delicate gullies carved out by hunger. he feels her teeth, takes her tounge. carmen, carmen, carmen, carmen.

in the future, he will try and say her name enough, but he never can.