Beautiful Ruins

By: Jess Walter

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini

Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins

Publisher's summary

Audie Award Nominee, Fiction and Best Solo Narration, 2013

The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out 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 begins 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 50 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 his long-lost love; the heroically preserved producer who once brought them together and his 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.

Gloriously inventive, constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a story of flawed yet fascinating people, navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.

©2012 Jess Walter (P)2012 HarperCollins Publisher

Review

loved. it didn't want it to end. I wanted I
The story to continue & never end.

quiet listen

smoothly and subtly draws the listener to the story and before you know it you are half way through the book. one could almost imagine this was written to be developed into a movie.

Disappointing Overall

I found that the parts of the story that take place in Italy are very interesting, and these are the parts where the narrator EXCELS. However,all of the rest of the multiple directions the story takes are barely tolerable, and then after all of that, the ending is not very satisfying. Guess I had my hopes up too high from all of the GREAT reviews I read.

Time well spent

Wonderful characterizations, both by the writer and the narrator. Good story, too. Sticks with you for a while.

A masterpiece!

I loved how it all came together at the end so beautifully. It was so moving. I just finished listening to it but I feel like I should listen to again right now.

Love the cover photo

What did you like best about Beautiful Ruins? What did you like least?

the cover photo drew me in. But the story did not live up to the photo. I need characters I can like or relate to. Was missing that in this story.

Would you be willing to try another book from Jess Walter? Why or why not?

No

Was Beautiful Ruins worth the listening time?

No

beautiful performance

Loved the narration. I would easily get swept away and forget it was only one person creating the characters. Note to the HSP: strong language, mild mention of drug and alcohol use, and sexual references, but no actual sex.

Beautiful story

A story nicely told and familiar characters… I enjoyed listening to this while riding a bike during covid lockdowns. A memorable sensation of traveling in my imagination, and meeting all these characters.

Ruins Include Thoughtful Review of Life's Choices

This story is set in one of the most beautiful areas I've visited, and, like the setting, describes characters and contexts that are at once well-known and the hidden paths, seemingly discovered by chance. The novel tells many stories about how an intricate matrix of crass and benevolent characters make life-choices by following the paths to "what they want" and "what is right", and the tension when those paths are not always in parallel. Even though the "players" have flaws and can cause pain for each other, each choice shines by expressing eventually some of the better parts of human life.
There are many examples of these choices, a small example is how Jess Walter describes the growth of one of the characters who has devoted himself to building a cantilevered tennis court along the beautiful Ligurian coast. He eventually discovers that unlike the photos he's seen of tennis (he's never played), every point in tennis includes a swing that misses.
The romance, for me, is more poignant because it optimistically allows some of the best parts of human love to be expressed not through a standard "happily-ever-after" resolution, and that life includes the harder, more complex, "what is right" choices.
The narrator Edoardo Ballerini brings a depth to the characters, Italian pronunciation, and even does a Welsh voice that you'd recognize. Well done!

OH!!! WOW!!!

I LOVE this book! The title is perfect. Even some ruins are just as beautiful in what they became as how they started out - completely different but beutiful. I???m still crying because???the book ended? the book/end was so well done? because I could have never imagined it would end this way. YES to all.

This book has so many great elements ??? and the narration of Edoardo Ballerini ??? spot on!! I laughed until I cried (especially the Richard Burton scenes ??? but so many others!), and I cried and didn???t want to stop. I lost a whole weekend because I could not stop listening ??? this is a warning. The only critical thing I can say about it is some parts start at the end and work back, some parts don???t, but in the end it was perfect. Rest assured you end up knowing what you need to know ??? and I would NOT change a thing. DO NOT SKIP THE EPILOG.

I would buy this again if I had to; thank goodness I can listen to it as many times as I want. Thank you Jess Walter and Audible!

Jess Walter - I will read anything you write from now on (I say that now...:).

The best review