Ann Patchett

Marilyn Herbert

On December 17, 1996, fourteen MRTA revolutionaries stormed the Japanese embassy in Peru in the middle of a party celebrating the Japanese Emperor's birthday. The siege was deadlocked for 126 days. Ann Patchett has fictionalized this dramatic and true event in her novel, Bel Canto. Bookclub-in-a-Box shows how Ann Patchett sets the stage and has the players act out the drama of this hostage-taking incident. What should be narrated as a tense and terse action-filled tragedy turns out to be a human story told with warmth and sardonic humor. Patchett has taken a cacophony of different characters - an opera singer, a Japanese businessman, a translator, a vice-president of a small South American country, other important dignitaries and a couple of dozen terrorists - and has created a lyrical story which resonates with the similarities among people, rather than their differences. The Bookclub-in-a-Box guide to Bel Canto will interpret Patchett's novel,voice by voice.

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