Bring on the tough stuff - there’s not just one right answer.
- From opera to Adele, what does art do for us? What does the characters' relationship to opera tell us about how art enriches human life?
- Will art really help you in a hostage crisis? In other words, are there limits to what art does for humanity?
- What is love? Is it self-sacrifice, a sense of wonder, a desire you can't explain, or a boppin' techno beat to get you straight to the Roxbury?
- What connects human beings to each other? Language? Music? Circumstances? Facebook?
- Why does Patchett choose opera as the art form that defines human experience of art and culture in this book? Is there something special about opera that makes it an especially good way to think about art? Or is it just the cool Viking costumes?
- What allows us to experience new things and become new people? Intense and out-of-the-ordinary circumstances? Art? Falling in love? Getting lost on a desert island? Oops! Wrong novel.
- Can we permanently experience life at its most wondrous and intense? Or is it something we can only cling to for a fleeting moment before going back to ordinary reality?
- Zoom-out alert: does the book, awesome as it is, do justice to the parts of the world that aren't so easily understood through a highly personal experience of art? We learn a lot about opera, but not as much about, say, what South America is actually like for people who vote and shop and go to school there. Would the book be richer and deeper if it explored those things through art as well as questions about how the fictional hostages experience an artistic transformation? You decide, Shmoopers.