Access Beautiful Ruins Narrated By Jess Walter Shown In Hardcover
respectfully disagree with everyone who thinks this is a unique and phenomenal book, It is horrible, seriously horrible, I gotof the way through before I realized that this book was degrading my quality of life, This is only the third book in my entire life I have given up on, and I wish I would have never even picked it up.
I truly liked the premise! A beautiful American finds herself on an isolated Italian island in the's, There is one hotel The Adequate View nestled in the sharp, rocky hills that is run by a man who dreams for more, There is a air of mystery around this American actress who recently left the filming of Cleopatra, That is where the interesting parts end, We then travel to Hollywood to hear about a completely asinine cast of characters in the present including the now ancient producer of Cleopatra, his assistant who I hated for no reason other than she sucks, and some guy who thought he was the shit for most of his life before he realized he wasn't and then couldn't deal.
Oh, but we're not done, The person that really pushed me over the edge was Pat, Oh, Pat. Theyear old, washed up, glimpse of fame musician who feels entitled to continue to follow his dream which is less about music and is more about drugs and women even though he also sucks.
His endless inner monologues on the purpose of life and how he is going to change made me want to gag, Get over yourself, ahole. Grow up. Get a job. Take a shower.
Oh, and we're STILL not done! Interspersed with all of these characters are random little stories about some author who used to vacation at The Adequate View, a soldier in WWII, and the's drama of Liz Taylor's love life.
Don't care. Could have been interesting but wasn't, Don't care.
Not a single character is even remotely likable, The writing is far from great, The story is confusing and jumps around in a completely illogical manner, Many reviews say that the stories come together in a surprising twist and the ending is interesting, Well, Mr. Walter, you have to start pulling some stuff together before page, I don't see what you would do in the lastpages that would redeem this book and make me think anything about it other than, "ugh.
"
Moving on. HeartStabbing Elaboration of Beauty
I kept this book on my shelf untouched for nearlyyears after I couldn't make it past page.
In April, with the spring weather, I decided to dust off its pretty jacket and read it, So many have reviewed this novel in the time since I bought this that I doubt many will even read this review, But I just feel compelled to add, . .
I was wowed, nearly speechless by the adductively alluring setting, ruins welling within me even now, months after my farewell, I realize the Beautiful Ruins's faults, but they didn't take away from its gorgeous cinematic qualities,
In one novel, the author contrasts:
A brilliant, breathtaking, blazing, Botticellian beauty of love and nature and flesh along the chromatic Italian Ligurian Sea coastline and on the movie set of Cleopatra in Rome, together with an appreciation for just being alive, under nights of sparkling,
With
A sadness submerging the spiritual hole left by the reminder that in life we must choose paths this or that, not this and that, yet we have but one life to live but so much love from which to give.
Italian Ruins near Ligurian Sea
For some reason, my emotional Achilles heel is the idea of a love between two people as a living organism, floating after the two have split and even subsequent to the dissipation by degrees of each's unilateral love for the other.
These spirits of lost love are the saddest ghosts to me, once so hopeful and gorgeous and vibrant, kissed into intimate knolls and notched in its lovers' souls, yet now doomed to obscurity then eternal demise unless someone captures the evergreen of its glory in art, which I guess is perhaps what Jess Walter means by using the symbolic beautiful ruins and fading painting therein.
Wonderful, book that keeps one totally engaged from the beginning to the turning of the last page, There was not a dull or uninteresting section in the entire three hundred plus pages, I loved the intertwining of the characters and their stories as they played out their lives against the backdrop of Hollywood during the Cleopatra days of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, to the tiny Italian town where so much of the action of the life of this book took place.
The characters were wonderful, so human, so needy, and so wanting, yet so very glorious in their realization that life can be and often is unrelenting in its ability to give one joy and happiness at a moment's notice.
I recommend this book to anyone who wants to find a few hours of realization that life weaves at times a convoluted picture and it is how we work out the strands of that picture that makes one's life so totally bearable and ultimately often times wonderful.
I have to remember this author and pick up some more of his novels, Beautiful Ruins
I bought this book because I heard the author on NPR and he was this super nerdy guy who talked like an economist and who said things like, “When you compare the decline of cultures, for example the decline of Rome or Imperial Britain, one can make a few general conclusion, such as, wealth shifts to the top and the masses are
consciously placated.
. . ” etc etc. Then I heard the book was fiction and my reaction was: “Whaaatt!! Fiction from this guy, called Beautiful Ruins, I gotta buy this book, ” I supposed I hoped for something apocolyptic, something along the line of The Road, And so when I started reading and when I discovered it is an unrequited love story about a Hollywood actress and an Italian teenager, I was a little taken back.
Beautiful Ruins is a wellwritten story about failure, Everybody fails. They fail at love. They fail at work. They fail at success. Nobody wins. The book is its strongest at capturing failure twenty/thirty years down the road, when the person who failed has moved on, lived a life, looks back, and judges their choices.
The different characters capture these moments at different times, There is a young, hopeful scriptwriter who sells his movie, but only because it is so awful it will never get made, The main protagonist, a young hollywood actress, is shoveled out of Cleopatra because she is pregnant, Once kicked out of the movie she falls truly, romantically in love to an Italian boy with whom lifes circumstances make love impossible, The book twists the lives of many different characters and interlocks their moments of failure and their futures, Its sadbut not that sadand poignant, Trying to figure what to make of this book, especially in context of the interview I heard on NPR, I began to view the story in its entirerty as an attempt to capture the decline of America through Hollywood, the placaters.
Beautiful Ruins casts Hollywood as the pinnacle, the place to be, But when seen up close and personal its a miserable den of facelifts and drug dependence where success is measured, not in artistic accomplishments, but dollars and where genius is subjugated to wet Tshirts and nipple slips.
Beautiful Ruins asks the audience to think about our culture and what it says about where we are going, It doesnt give any answers its not that simple, Its more of a youbethejudge type of situation, If you are wondering about my judgement I could sit here and talk about it for days, but it would boil something like: “We are not unilaterally declining.
It depends on what you choose to focus, . . ” Nice, measured, and uncomitall. catch me at another time and Ill proclaim, with a stamped fist, that “domesday is on the horizon”,
P. S. Thanks to a friend who admitted to me that she, and not just me mom, read my goodreads, Thanks. Its good to know that I am not drunken idiot, . . all the time.
"Isn't it enough to be out walking together in the sunlight"
Yes, Yes indeed.
This isn't quite fivestar material, but it was so touching and original and unexpectedly funny that I won't quibble over imperfections, A favorable sitelinkreview today in The New York Times said Jess Walters new book is like a film script, but to my way of thinking it is more like Walter as a oneman performance artist, who suddenly pulls all kinds of horns, drums, bells and other props out of his bottomless pockets to illustrate a point, to make us laugh, to break into our attention and to declare: “are we entirely mad” His work is brilliantly interpreted and performed by Edoardo Ballerini on audio, and to hear the thick and heavy tones of Richard Burton declaiming in a small outboard floating off the coast of Italy is to feel a stab of remembered joy.
Fifteen years from conception to production, this is Walter at his crazy, mad, funny, piercing best, for he skewers us and our lives by reflecting popular culture back at ourselves, but showers us with tender mercies at the end.
The novel covers a time frame from the early sixties through at least the last decade, and covers at least as many personalities as years, But what a wild and happy party it is, with all the usual suspects: love, greed, envy, pride, lust, infidelityand, Ill say it again, finally love.
“Its a love story,” we hear as Hollywood producer Michael Deane pitches his latest to the studio executives at the end of the book, And I guess it always is, in the end, for that is all that really matters,
Take this trip, and if you have eschewed listening on audio for whatever reason, throw aside your inhibitions and do yourself a favor, This is performance art, and may be listened to with great effect, We have a nubile Hollywood actress with a bit part in an Elizabeth Taylor film, a Hollywood producer, a small Italian coastal village, a young man pitching a storyyou get the idea.
There is lots going on but it always with the greatest clarity that we can see that life ”isnt always easy” and that we usually find our hapless ways despite, or perhaps because of, our questionable choices.
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