Review: Bel Canto

The set up for Ann Patchett's Orange Prize winner, Bel Canto, is attention-grabbing -- an international group of businessmen and diplomats, one female opera singer, and a polyglot translator are held captive by a gang of revolutionaries in an unnamed banana republic for several months.

But despite the premise, the story has no zing. It plods along, focusing on the personal relationships among the people involved, particularly the relationships between some of the captives and captors.

The story is written well enough, but the issues it raises about the nature of talent, love, and communication are pretty banal. Not that it had to be an adventure or a thriller -- but it was surprisingly ho-hum given the potential.

OTHER REVIEWS

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ANNOUNCEMENT!

Inspired by Lezlie's articulate and thoughtful mission statement on Books 'N Border Collies, I have re-assessed my priorities and what it most important in my life. After great deliberation, I have decided to revamp my blog -- from here on out, this blog will be devoted entirely to KITTENS. Primarily, I will be posting cute pictures of kittens. Send them in!

List: Nobel Laureates

The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded 107 times to 111 Nobel Laureates between 1901 and 2015. I have a goal of reading at least one book by every recipient of the Prize.

If anyone reading this has a similar goal and would like me to link their progress reports to this post, I am happy to do so. Leave a comment with your link and I will add it. There is a group blog called Read the Nobels where people more actively pursuing this project post reviews and record their progress.

Here is the list of Nobel Laureates, starting with the most recent. If I have read any of the author's books, I listed the titles in red after the name; if I have books on my TBR shelf, they are listed in blue. I plan to eventually read something by everyone of these people, even if I have nothing on my TBR shelf right now. Although some may be hard to find as I look at names that ring no bells for me.

Kazuo Ishiguro

• The Buried Giant
• The Remains of the Day
• Never Let Me Go
• An Artist of the Floating World

Bob Dylan
Svetlana Alexievich
Patrick Modiano

• Missing Person

Alice Munro

• Love of a Good Woman (NBCC Award)
• The View from Castle Rock

Mo Yan
Tomas Tranströmer
Mario Vargas Llosa
Herta Müller
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
Doris Lessing

• The Golden Notebook (All-TIME 100)
• The Grass is Singing

Orhan Pamuk

• Snow

Harold Pinter
Elfriede Jelinek
J. M. Coetzee

• Disgrace (Booker Prize)
• The Life and Times of Michael K (Booker Prize; reviewed here)

Imre Kertész
V.S. Naipaul

• A Bend in the River (Modern Library's Top 100)
• A House for Mr. Biswas (Modern Library's Top 100)
• In a Free State (Booker Prize)

Gao Xingjian

• One Man's Bible

Günter Grass

• The Tin Drum (reviewed here)

José Saramago

• Journey to Portugal: In Pursuit of Portugal's History and Culture

Dario Fo
Wislawa Szymborska
Seamus Heaney

• Beowulf (Costa award winner)

Kenzaburo Oe
Toni Morrison

• Beloved (Pulitzer Prize; All-TIME 100; College Board's 101; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• The Bluest Eye
• Jazz
• Paradise
• Song of Solomon (Radcliffe's Top 100)

Derek Walcott
Nadine Gordimer

• Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories (reviewed here)
• Jump and Other Short Stories
• A Sport of Nature

Octavio Paz
Camilo José Cela
Naguib Mahfouz

• The Beggar (reviewed here)

Joseph Brodsky
Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka
Claude Simon
Jaroslav Seifert
William Golding

• Lord of the Flies (Modern Library's Top 100)
• Rites of Passage (Booker Prize)
• The Spire (Anthony Burgess Favorite)

Gabriel García Márquez

• The General in his Labyrinth
• Of Love and Other Demons
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• Memories of My Melancholy Whores
• One Hundred years of Solitude (College Board's 101)

Elias Canetti
Czesław Miłosz
Odysseas Elytis
Isaac Singer

• A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw

Vicente Aleixandre
Saul Bellow

• The Adventures of Augie March (All-TIME 100; College Board's 101; Modern Library's Top 100; National Book Award; reviewed here)
• The Dean's December
• Henderson the Rain King (Modern Library's Top 100)
• Herzog (All-TIME 100; National Book Award winner)
• Humbolt's Gift (Anthony Burgess Favorite; Pulitzer Prize; reviewed here)
• Mr. Sammler's Planet (National Book Award; reviewed here)
• Ravelstein
• Sieze the Day
• The Victim (Anthony Burgess Favorite)

Eugenio Montale
Harry Martinson
Eyvind Johnson
Patrick White
Heinrich Böll
Pablo Neruda
Alexsandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

• August 1914

Samuel Beckett

• Endgame
• Waiting for Godot

Yasunari Kawabata
Miguel Ángel Asturias
Nelly Sachs
Shmuel Agnon
Michail Sholokhov
Jean-Paul Sartre

• The Age of Reason

Giorgos Seferis
John Steinbeck

• Cannery Row
• The Grapes of Wrath (All-TIME 100; College Board's 101; MLA's Top 30; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100; Pulitzer Prize)
• Of Mice and Men (Easton Press Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• Travels with Charley in Search of America
• The Winter of Our Discontent

Ivo Andric
Saint-John Perse
Salvatore Quasimodo
Boris Pasternak

• Doctor Zhivago (College Board's 101; reviewed here)

Albert Camus

• The Plague
• The Stranger (College Board's 101)

Juan Ramón Jiménez
Halldór Laxness

• Independent People

Ernest Hemingway

• The Complete Stories
• Dangerous Summer
• A Farewell to Arms (College Board's 101; Easton Press Top 100; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (Anthony Burgess Favorite; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• In Our Time (Radcliffe's Top 100)
• Islands in the Stream
• A Moveable Feast (French Connections)
• The Old Man and the Sea (Anthony Burgess Favorite; Radcliffe's Top 100; Pulitzer Prize)
• The Sun Also Rises (All-TIME 100; French Connections; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• True at First Light

Winston Churchill

• The Second World War (Six Volume Set)

François Mauriac

• Viper's Tangle

Pär Lagerkvist
Bertrand Russell
William Faulkner

• Absolom, Absolom! (Radcliffe's Top 100)
• As I Lay Dying (College Board's 101; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• The Hamlet
• Light in August (All-TIME 100; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• The Reivers (Pulitzer Prize)
• The Sound and the Fury (All-TIME 100; College Board's 101; Easton Press Top 100; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100; reviewed here)
• The Wild Palms

T. S. Eliot*
André Gide

• The Counterfeiters

Hermann Hesse

• Siddhartha (reviewed here)

Gabriela Mistral
Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
Frans Eemil Sillanpää
Pearl S. Buck

• The Good Earth (Pulitzer Prize)

Roger Martin du Gard
Eugene O'Neill

• Long Day's Journey into Night

Luigi Pirandello
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin
John Galsworthy

• The Forsyte Saga

Erik Axel Karlfeldt
Sinclair Lewis

• Babbitt (College Board's 101; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• It Can't Happen Here
• Kingsblood Royal
• Main Street (Modern Library's Top 100)
• Arrowsmith (Pulitzer)
• Dodsworth

Thomas Mann

• Death in Venice

Sigrid Undset

• Kristin Lavransdatter

Henri Bergson
Grazia Deledda
George Bernard Shaw

• Caesar and Cleopatra
• Candida

Władysław Reymont
William Butler Yeats*
Jacinto Benavente
Anatole France

• The Revolt of the Angels

Knut Hamsun
Carl Spitteler
Henrik Pontoppidan
Karl Adolph Gjellerup
Verner von Heidenstam
Romain Rolland
Rabindranath Tagore
Gerhart Hauptmann
Maurice Maeterlinck
Paul Heyse
Selma Lagerlöf
Rudolf Christoph Eucken
Rudyard Kipling

• Kim (Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• Stalky and Co.

Giosuè Carducci
Henryk Sienkiewicz

• Quo Vadis

José Echegaray y Eizaguirre
Frédéric Mistral
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
Theodor Mommsen
Sully Prudhomme


NOTE

Updated on January 21, 2018.


OTHERS READING THE WORKS OF NOBEL LAUREATES

Read the Nobels (group blog)
Rebecca Reads

If you would like to be listed here, please leave a comment with links to your progress reports or reviews and I will add them here.

Favorite Author: Richard Ford

I have been smitten with Richard Ford ever since he introduced me to his Everyman hero Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter. I followed Bascombe through the Pulitzer-winning sequel, Independence Day, and the most recent Lay of the Land. Like John Updike's Rabbit novels, Bascombe's saga offered me a tour inside the male psyche for which I am grateful and on which I often muse.

Ford also is justly acclaimed for his short stories. Those I have read, I appreciated. But I am not good about reading short stories -- always passing up a volume of stories for a novel when picking my next book. But I plan to read Ford's short story collections as well as the novels. Vintage Ford is a collection of previously published stories, but I include it on this list because it also includes a short memoir published for the first time.

Those I have already read are in red. Those currently on my TBR shelf are in blue. I will eventually read them all.

A Piece of My Heart (1976)

The Ultimate Good Luck (1981)

The Sportswriter (1986)

Rock Springs (short stories; 1987)

Wildlife(1990)

Independence Day (1995)

Women with Men (short stories; 1997)

A Multitude of Sins (short stories; 2002)

Vintage Ford (collection; 2004)

The Lay of the Land (2006)

Canada (2012)

NOTES

Last updated on April 19, 2012.

Colorful Reading: Update

I finished the first of my Colorful Reading Challenge books -- Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke. This is the third in Burke's Dave Robicheaux series and won the author an Edgar award. Deservedly. It is a particularly good volume of what is probably the best mystery series going. While I can get tired of Burke's ultra-rich language, and Robicheaux's holier-than-thou manner often rubs the wrong way, I always come back for more. Next up is Towers of Gold -- I have 100 pages to go.