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

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

Easily my new favorite book from AUDIBLE.

I purchased this book on the recommendation of its reader, Edoardo Ballerini. His work on Lou Burney's Gutshot Straight made me a huge fan of his and the author. So I purchased it without knowing the first thing about it. What a treasure!

In my review of "14" I listed Mr. Ballerini as one of the top 4 readers on Audible. Scott Brick being a distant 5th, Edoardo competes for the top spot with Will Patton (James Lee Burke novels), Tom Stechschulte (No Country For Old Men) and Ray Porter (Dawn Patrol). The bottom line is that Ballerini's work is up to the task of this masterpiece of modern literature.

As for the book, I can only say I fell in love with all of it. I loved its history, beauty, tragedy, romance, mystery, characters and storytelling. Does this make you want to listen? I hope so, because it is so much more...

Worth listening to

Any additional comments?

The story is OK - a bit American, moralistic and repetitive with the themes, but it works OK. The narrator is brilliant! - he does all the accents (without overdoing them), and makes you want to hear more (despite the reserves you may have about the storyline).
All up, worth buying.

I only found a little bit of beauty in these ruins

STORY (fiction) - Ruins, yes, but beautiful? Let's see, the setting in Italy sounds beautiful. Then there's beauty in...um, there's beauty in... sorry, can't think of anything else! This book is about multiple characters in multiple time periods who are down and out, period. Their relationships, their careers, their dreams, everything. Some just drown themselves in booze. Others have fighting spirits and good intentions but are still caught in downward spirals. The final scene with Pasquali and Dee is AMOST beautiful, but even that has a painful undertone.

The characters are all loosely connected by the American movie industry or by a tiny hotel in an Italian cliffside village but, when all is said and done, their stories don't come together in any meaningful way. I did, however, enjoy the book. The characters may be down and out, but that doesn't mean their stories are boring or depressing. There was enough going on to hold my interest. The book does jump around between time periods and characters, but I didn't find it hard to follow.

PERFORMANCE - As always, Edoardo Ballerini was superb!! Love his Italian accent and his performance of Richard Burton. Perfection!

OVERALL - There are a few brief descriptions of sexual situations and a small amount of cursing. Even though this book is highly rated and a movie is planned to be made, I don't necessarily recommend it. As I said, I was entertained, but I'm not really sure why. It's probably written for listeners who are more literary than I am and I'm probably missing the whole point. Oh, well.

Not "The Help"!

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

I would recommend this with some reservations. The book is being touted as the new "The Help". If you're expecting a nuanced book like "The Help", you may be disappointed. The characters seemed cliched and one-dimensional and the story line contrived. While it had its sweet and wise moments, it often seemed overwrought with too many plot lines, many of them rather immaterial to the point of the book (life's ups and downs and how we redeem ourselves anyway). The book would have been better with fewer plot lines and more in-depth character development of fewer characters. As new characters and their stories unfolded, I found myself asking "And the point is?" The ending goes on and on and on and I wondered if the author just couldn't sum it up. That said, I listened to the end and felt moderately engaged with the sometimes over-long story.