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

Just wonderful

Luminous prose, a story that is never formulaic and yet somehow achieves exquisite symmetry, three dimensional characters, a bit of time on the sun drenched Cinque Terre coast, an occasional delicious phrase in Italian, and a walk-on by Richard Burton. It's just wonderful.

Great story!

Beautiful story with many twists and turns. Great characters that leave you wanted to learn more.

Astonishing!

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Absolutely.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Pasquale is intriguing and thoughtful~ and the narrator's voice conjures up this Italian innkeeper's dreamy thought processes perfectly.

Which scene was your favorite?

Too many to count.

If you could rename Beautiful Ruins, what would you call it?

The Accidental Destination

Any additional comments?

This is a tour de force~ not quick by any means, but lingering, like an Italian sunset.

Excellent tale with imaginative reading by Edoardo

Would you consider the audio edition of Beautiful Ruins to be better than the print version?

Yes! Struggling to read the Italian and differentiating Italian character voices would have lessoned the impact.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Beautiful Ruins?

Dee's first arrival at the hotel. I got caught up in Pascuale's(sp) love-at-first sight.

What does Edoardo Ballerini bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

He brings the Italian to life, adding emotion so I can sometimes grasp the meaning without translation.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

Laugh out loud! The fisherman's salty insults cracked me up.

Highly recommend this as a good ole fashion

Well constructed and the ending was inspirational! A good story with good characters with a great big bow and beautifully wrapped up! Listen to this one!!

Engaging

What did you love best about Beautiful Ruins?

The story, the characters, the narrator, the surprising humor.

Any additional comments?

One of my top favorites books of all time.

Fantastic book!

I’ve logged around 100 audible books and this has got to be one of the most fulfilling books I’ve read. It will make you laugh out loud and feel like crying.
Beautifully read by Edoardo Ballerini as always.
Definitely worth your time.

Beautiful, refreshing love story.

Beautiful Ruins has had a lot of hype. It was nominated for two Audie Awards in 2013, it was NPR’s Fresh Air’s books of the Year, and Esquire Book of the Year, and a New York Times #1 Best Seller.

I alternated between Kindle and Audiobook (with more time in the audiobook.) Edoardo Ballerini was a perfect narrator. His Italian sounded perfect (although I have zero ability to really evaluate it.)

Beautiful Ruins weaves together a number of stories. It starts with a young Italian inn owner in 1962 and a mysterious American actress that comes to his out of the way inn as a guests. It moves to a modern story of a movie producer and his assistant. It mixes in a number of storylines from 1962, current time and in between.

I tend to like interwoven storylines, and this was executed perfectly. There is a long epilogue at the end that wraps of ALL of the loose ends (and there are a lot of loose ends to wrap up.) I appreciated the ending, but it was not necessarily needed for all of the storylines. But the focus of the book required it. Part of the focus is on how one story affects other stories. And so the careful attention to how each of the stories worked out (or did not) continued that focus.

There is a theme of choosing what story to live (similar to Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.) But while that could go wildly wrong with many other authors, it also reminded me of the movie Once (which I love). Many who did not like the movie Once did not like the end result. The characters from Once did not choose the most romantic ending, they chose the one that fulfilled their prior commitments. And for the most part (but not all) that is what happened in Beautiful Ruins.

Part of the twist of this book is that it uses the real Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor and the filming of Cleopatra as a plot device and characters in the book. Handled badly, that could have been a problem, but in reality they provided interest, without detracting from the story.

Not all of the characters were lovable, but enough of them were. That is the way of real life. Not everyone does what they should or has your best interest at heart. Some are wrapped up in their own issues and addictions. Some are able to overcome their issues and addictions to actually love you as you need. Some people are made better by love, some are not.

In some ways this is just a love story. It is the story of how people fall in love and choose to live their lives. But there is depth to the stories that really shows that love is not about personal fulfillment as much as commitment. And that is not usually the way that love stories work out in our modern self-obsessed world. So I want to celebrate a book that tell a true story of love as commitment instead of love as fulfillment.

(originally posted on my blog, Bookwi.se)

Great narrator; story OK

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

I though the narrator was great. I really enjoyed the descriptions and interactions with the Italian fisherman and each scene which included the fisherman whose wife uses his carbine as a garden stake was priceless.

What could Jess Walter have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

The characters were incredibly depressing. The title is apt. Each one of them is a "ruin" and makes a "ruin" of their lives except for one, Pasquale Torsi. The long winded descriptions, hyperbole, similies, metaphors sucked the life out of the plot. While the author is obviously a great writer, I got really tired of the flowerly language.

What about Edoardo Ballerini’s performance did you like?

Excellent use of accents and different speaking voices to portray the different characters. Very smooth. His narration made the book palatable and greatly enhanced the story.

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

Maybe if the scenery looked gorgeous.

Takes a while to gain momentum

Any additional comments?

At the beginning of this book, I found my mind wandering quite a bit. For me, it really took a while to get into the story. But, the author does a beatiful job of weaving together several lives and closes the book off wonderfuly.