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Loading... Beautiful Ruins (2012)by Jess Walter
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A perfect summer read with a crazy cast of characters and settings on the coast of Italy and Hollywood and Seattle and even Sandpoint, ID as movies are made and pitched, loves are found and lost. Richard Burton figures prominently. Snippets of Italian are welcome as I'm studying it. The book wraps up satisfyingly with damp eyes and satisfaction that all is right in an unfair world. And it was recommended by Nick Hornby in The Believer. ( ) I felt there were at least 3 different books in this novel. The episodic chapters, flashing back and forward in time, did not flow well, nor did I care for any of the several protagonists introduced (some only half way through the book). There was definitely good writing in many places, with some excellent phrases that popped out amid the reading. The description of the caregiver's point of view of a loved one with Alzheimer's was particularly poignant. Here’s a perfect poolside summer read propelled by the glamour of old world Hollywood, the romanticism of the Italian Riviera, and the tragedy of fate and deeply flawed characters. This is a nonlinear story about several stories that intersect across decades and continents, highlighting our deepest desires, our most destructive demons, and “life [as] a glorious catastrophe” (275). This character-driven novel opens in Cinque Terre, Italy, specifically in a small fishing village that’s home to a young man, Pasquale, retuning to care for his mother and the provincial family hotel, ironically named “The Hotel with the Adequate View.” In the beginning, Pasquale meets an American actress from the set of the Liz Taylor and Richard Burton film Cleopatra, and it’s through the meeting of these two characters, Pasquale and Dee, that we are introduced to an interconnected web of other characters’ stories—spanning from WWII to present day. To me, this book is perfection: beautifully ruined characters who, while roughly imperfect, are completely endearing; gritty realism with just enough dark humor, self-awareness, and self-deprecation; and a plot that stays interesting and intriguing and surprising from its opening scene in Cinque Terre in the 1960s to its closing scene on the same rocky coast in modern day times. ✨I was fortuitous enough to be in Cinque Terre, Italy while reading this novel. Again, perfection.✨ I think this one should be a 3.5 star but since I liked more than I disliked I'll err on the high side. The beginning is great, it gets a little slow, and the ending is rushed. Overall, it's an interesting story with many different angles. What we were given was very good, but I wanted (and still want) to know more about each person and each of the angles.
Ruins constitutes a departure for Walter, another unplowed field, and he harrows it straight and true, turning up the fertile humus of the culture’s soiled psyche. Beautiful Ruins collides its broad range of characters in unexpected, unique ways, and the wonderful light touch of the satire makes them eminently believable. Unlike the Juvenalian satirists, whose righteous indignation sometimes results in flat, two-dimensional, cardboard characterizations, Walter’s people inspire sympathy, belief, even a little self-examination. Am I like this? Do I have any qualities that resemble the ones I’m reading about here? If I do, where do I get help? Jess Walter has written a novel that sprawls on the lawn, looks up fondly at the achingly blue American sky and gazes into the deep humor of our collective human condition. That’s what good satire does—it reminds us who we really are. Humans. Walter is simply great on how we live now, and — in this particular book — on how we lived then and now, here and there. “Beautiful Ruins” is his Hollywood novel, his Italian novel and his Pacific Northwestern novel all braided into one: an epic romance, tragicomic, invented and reported (Walter knows his “Cleopatra” trivia), magical yet hard-boiled (think García Márquez meets Peter Biskind), with chapters that encompass not just Italy in the ’60s and present-day Hollywood, but also Seattle and Britain and Idaho, plot strands unfolding across the land mines of the last half-century — an American landscape of vice, addiction, loss and heartache, thwarted careers and broken dreams. It is also a novel about love: amorous love, filial love, parental love and the deep, sustaining love of true friendship.... His balanced mixture of pathos and comedy stirs the heart and amuses as it also rescues us from the all too human pain that is the motor of this complex and ever-evolving novel. Any reservations the reader might have about another book about Hollywood, about selling one’s soul (or someone else’s, and pocketing the change) will probably be swept aside by this high-wire feat of bravura storytelling. Walter is a talented and original writer. This novel is a standout not just because of the inventiveness of its plot, but also because of its language. Jess Walter is essentially a comic writer: Sometimes he's asking readers to laugh at the human condition; sometimes he's inviting us to just plain laugh. Belongs to Publisher SeriesHarper Perennial Olive Editions (2015 Olive) AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
A novel that spans fifty years. The Italian housekeeper and his long-lost American starlet; the producer who once brought them together, and his assistant. A glittering world filled with unforgettable characters. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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