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 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 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. (description from amazon.com)
I loved, loved, loved this book. The plot is very developed and I am not that good enough of a writer to describe it for you (so that is why I relied on the description from amazon.com). It was very different from what I usually read and halfway through the year it is my top book of 2012. It starts a little slow and confusing, because it jumps from 1962 to "recently" and there are a lot of characters to think about (but not too many that it is overwhelming) but as each page went by I wanted to know just how the author was going to bring all these characters together! And he did. Successfully! Beautiful writing with likeable, but flawed characters and humor. Practically perfect!
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 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 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. (description from amazon.com)
I loved, loved, loved this book. The plot is very developed and I am not that good enough of a writer to describe it for you (so that is why I relied on the description from amazon.com). It was very different from what I usually read and halfway through the year it is my top book of 2012. It starts a little slow and confusing, because it jumps from 1962 to "recently" and there are a lot of characters to think about (but not too many that it is overwhelming) but as each page went by I wanted to know just how the author was going to bring all these characters together! And he did. Successfully! Beautiful writing with likeable, but flawed characters and humor. Practically perfect!
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