
Bel Canto
2001 · 318 pages
Guerrillas storm a vice president's mansion somewhere in South America and hold the room for months. Among the hostages is a soprano who sings each morning, and everyone begins falling in love.
★ 5.5

Guerrillas storm a vice president's mansion somewhere in South America and hold the room for months. Among the hostages is a soprano who sings each morning, and everyone begins falling in love.

The tabloid Bild-Zeitung had branded Böll a terrorist sympathizer, so he answered with this: a quiet housekeeper spends one night with a wanted man and the papers take her honor apart.

Conrad wrote the first great modern novel of terrorism. Verloc keeps a seedy London shop, informs on anarchists for a foreign embassy, and is ordered to bomb the Greenwich Observatory to frighten England.