AP: I love those lines. Go ahead.
SA: Speaker: Stranger, what do you seek or ask from us?
Tamino: Friendship and love.
Speaker: And are you prepared even if it costs you your life?
Tamino: I am.
AP: Do you want to weep?
SA: Yeah, but also let me just take off my editor’s eyeshade and place it over my heart, because it’s so rare that you get an epigraph that’s right on the money like that — one you can flip back to having just finished the book and say, “Oh, perfect!”
AP: I’ve always thought an epigraph an example of really good writing followed by an example of often really mediocre writing. [Laughter]
SA: Look, if we start to think that way here we’ll all be out of work very soon. [Laughter] But, friendship and love: You evoke these in Bel Canto, you create this ideal society, and with it you make us confront the enormous problems that come with the creation of an ideal society. It’s a society that came into being at gunpoint, organized itself around opera, chess, and French cooking, and so is such a massive contradiction that it cannot possibly survive — and does not. It presents a rather large political and philosophical problem, doesn’t it?
AP: I think that the problem is twofold: One, the guerillas end up saving the people they don’t care about saving. If you’re thinking in terms of some sort of spiritual salvation, they’re taking the wealthiest people and somehow redirecting their lives towards the better, which was not the Generals’ intention. At the same time they’re taking these very poor children and saving them through exposure to the kinds of things that come with wealth and luxury. All the Generals really know is that they want something to be different and something to be better. But they really haven’t thought it out beyond that. And so what they get is not what they had vaguely formulated in their minds. They get something different and they get something better, but it is a passage into a world that is tied to the very materialism that is of course bringing down “their people.”
SA:Right, and it’s this that the people end up praying for. Here’s a passage about Carmen at the end of chapter five: “Yes, the Generals wanted something better for the people, but weren’t they [the guerillas] the people? Would it be the worst thing in the world if nothing happened at all, if they all stayed together in this generous house? Carmen prayed hard. . . . What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.” A romantic dream about a beautiful world that cannot possibly be sustained.
AP: Right.
SA: Opera, of course, is also a beautiful world that can’t be sustained, which is probably why people become so nutty about it. Mr. Hosokawa is such a nut. At the risk of being brusque, but to come right out with it, since you did write this book, Bel Canto, where do you fall on the opera nut scale?
AP: I’m not one, but I used to have a boyfriend who was an opera nut. He was once a Canadian quiz kid and he had memorized the Grove Encyclopedia of Opera by the time he was eight. He knew everything in the world about opera. In the years that we were together he played opera all the time and I would walk into the room and think, Oh that’s nice. [Laughs] We never talked about it. Probably something lodged in my brain during those years, but I kick myself that I never did the work to figure it all out when the quiz kid was at my disposal. Years later, when I was watching this [Peruvian hostage] story unfolding on the news it seemed so much like an opera to me. Though at that point in my life I had never been to an opera.
SA: No!
AP: Yeah.
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!