Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Publisher: Harper Audio

Publish Date: June 12, 2012

Format: Audio

Discs: 10

ISBN: 978 0062268365

The story beings in 1962.  On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks on over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat.  She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying.

And the story beings again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio’s back lot – searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.

What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives.  From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Walter introduces us to the tangled lives of a dozen unforgettable characters: the starstruck Italian innkeeper and is long-lost love; the heroically preserved producer who once brought them together and is idealistic young assistant; the army veteran turned fledgling novelist and the rakish Richard Burton himself, whose appetites set the whole story in motion – along with the husbands and wives, lovers and dreamers, superstars and losers, who populate their world in the decades that follow.

My Thoughts

Well, all I really have to say about this is that it is one hot mess of a book.  Like the description states the story unveils a dozen characters...a dozen!  And not only that, but each of them have a point of view in the story telling.  This book is all over the map.  Every chapter is told by a different character, during a different time period in a different city.  I listened to this on audio, and while I found the narration enjoyable to listen to I found myself either lost in the story and had no idea what was happening or bored out of my mind from the rambling. 

There is not one character that is likable, all of them drove me crazy.  I can't think of one thing that I took away from this novel or that I found memorable.  I'm not sure how a novel with so many story lines happened to come to a neat and tidy end in no time flat.  If felt like the story was still unfolding then all of a sudden...The End.  Like at the end of a movie when it's over then they show a still picture with a character update.  Everything started with such promise, why couldn't the story have just continued on with Pasquael and the beautiful setting of Italy?

2 stars for the narration of Edorado Ballerini.

My Rating: ««

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The reviews made here are my personal opinion. I’m not being paid to review any of these books. I am by no means a professional book reviewer or editor.  I do this for the love of books.