Bel Canto

by Ann Patchett

“Verdi or Wagner?” said the voice from the other side of the screen. “Both,” Father Arguedas said, but when he recovered himself from the surprise of the question he changed his answer. “Verdi.” “You are young,” the voice replied. “Come back and tell me again in twenty years, if God allows that I am here.”

Without exception, these were men who were largely unfamiliar with the concept of free time. The ones who were very rich stayed at their offices late into the evening. They sat in the backseats of cars and dictated letters while their drivers shepherded them home. The ones who were young and very poor worked just as hard, albeit at a different kind of work.

On first reading it can be hard to recognize how biting the novel ultimately is about class privilege

“Every now and then she wouldn’t bring out the book at all. She would say she was tired. She would say that so much beauty hurt her. Sometimes a week or even two could pass. No Seurat! I remember feeling almost frantic, such a dependency I had come to feel for those paintings. But it was the rest from it, the waiting, that made us love the book so madly. I could have had one life but instead I had another because of this book my grandmother protected,”

It was the waiting that made us love it. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Serialization

For the rest of Gen’s life he will remember this night in two completely different ways.

This choice to lift us away into a double consciousness - both present and future - heightens the situations importance and stakes, but also means we’re not grounded in it the same way. At a slight remove