Fairly often, I am tempted to reread a book. Most of the time, I resist the urge. There are some notable exceptions. I have, for example, returned to Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series—a trilogy in five parts, as the marketing sometimes reads—any number of times. As regular readers of this column know, I am currently engaged in a reread of Ed McBain’s masterful 87th Precinct series. I’ve revisited a variety of other books now and again, but it isn’t my usual practice.
It’s not that I have any philosophical objections to rereading. Indeed, I find compelling the idea that a single book can come to have layers of depth and meaning to a reader who revisits it over the course of a life. For me, however, it is a question of time. I know that I will never be able to read all of the books I would like to read. I’ve accepted this—mostly—but I am keenly aware that rereading a book means I am not reading something new.
Of late, however, I have been enthusiastically rereading a novel I first read more than 20 years ago. That novel is Bel Canto by Iowa Writers’ Workshop grad Ann Patchett, and under normal circumstances, it would be an unlikely candidate for me to revisit.
I love Patchett’s work—including Bel Canto—but I have not read her complete oeuvre. I have read neither her first novel, 1992’s The Patron Saint of Liars, nor her most recent, 2023’s Tom Lake—and there are a couple of others I haven’t gotten to yet (though I have read the collection of short stories that she submitted for her M.F.A. from Iowa, which you can only find in the collection of the University of Iowa Libraries). As a rule, I would be inclined to read the Patchett books I have yet to read before I would return to one I have read—even one I love.
But the newest edition of Bel Canto was irresistible because it is annotated by the author herself. In her own handwriting, Patchett reveals which moments she loves, which she wishes she could rewrite, the inspiration for characters and plot points, the factual mistakes she made, and more.
We learn the origin of certain ideas that appear across her work: “The reason I write so often about diabetics is because my friend Tavia has diabetes.” We see her take herself to task for turns of phrase: “Fingers have already fluttered. It shouldn’t happen twice.” And we read her musings about writing more generally: “There is remarkably little violence in my books, but I can see how violence moves the story along (which is why violence is popular in books).” The annotations are endlessly revealing—and just plain fun to read.
As for the original text of Bel Canto, it is as wonderful as I remember. The story opens with an extravagant international dinner party being overrun by a ragtag band of terrorists who release all of the female partygoers except for a world-renowned opera star. The story unfurls slowly but compellingly—even though Patchett reveals the ending near the beginning of the book.
In her introduction to this edition, Patchett quite rightly suggests that readers who have not read the book before should start with an unannotated copy. But if you have read and enjoyed Bel Canto, I suspect you will find it a joy to reread it with Patchett herself as your guide to its underpinnings.