
Happiness exists. Don’t wait to find yours.
“Happiness, if he was right to use that word, was something that until now he had only experienced in music. The difference was that now the music was a person. Could it be possible that such happiness had existed in the world all along and he had never once heard mention of it?“
Reading books is so much easier than writing about them. Especially when you’re dealing with the kind of book you can read in a single sitting. Usually I make notes or underline special thoughts or interesting phrases. This time, however, due to the emotional stress and expectations of the outcome, I wanted nothing more than the story to unfold as soon as possible.
Although the love story at first sight seems like a cliché, we soon forgive the writer who strives to convince us with the intensity of the situation and effects of relationships, which are spun between people trapped in one house. How the hostages and the kidnappers have built a unique home, completely separated from the outside world, and have forgotten the role at opposite poles. How their love for music has become a universal language, unbelievably. In the end we are all just people, interpreted at most.
At the center of the house is the secret love of the entrepreneur, a billionaire, for music and his life muse, an opera diva. He was lucky to meet her and for them to come together, even though it happened in very unfortunate circumstances, at the State Protocol performance at the house which was seized by kidnappers.
I'm still more than thrilled. Only over time can you relax and slowly pick up the love piles scattered around. You breathe with and for all involved; the author Patchett doesn’t let you down. A kind of Romeo and Juliet. Sadly, many were Romeos and Juliets among the kidnapped.
“He wondered suddenly if he knew her at all. They were family. They had come to depend on one another. She was an excellent wife and mother, and surely he had loved her in his own fashion, but happiness?“

Read more in Bel Canto (2).