Ooops

I just finished Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. It's the first novel I've read in quite a while, and I enjoyed it even though it's definitely a woman's book -- very romantic. Two goofs that I noticed:

• "He would never refute the beauty of her singing, the warm and liquid quality that so well matched the watery Rusalka, but there was no point in telling Mr. Hosokawa that this woman did not know a word of Czechoslovakian." (p. 164)
• ". . . when [Mr. Hosokawa] woke up, General Benjamin was still moving his rook forward and back across the same three squares, careful to never take his fingers off the horse's head." (p.228)

Of course two slip-ups in 320 pages is nothing to be embarrassed about, but these are two pretty obvious errors.

Another goof I noticed turned out not to be a goof at all. On page 162 we're told that the famous opera singer "was Mozart's Susanna" and that her guard "was the Countess Rosina." I had never heard the countess referred to by her first name before, and I was pretty sure that the author should have said that the guard was Countess Almaviva. A quick Google search, however, finds that "Countess Rosina" and "Countess Almaviva" are about equally popular. Score one for Ms. Patchett.

One final mistake -- in fact, the biggest one -- is the short epilogue. The book would be better without it.

Postscript: 15 minutes after posting this, I learned that the author (or should I say the book?) was the winner of the 2002 PEN/Faulkner award. And I found a site, reviewofbooks.com, that has a good collection of reviews.