Beautiful Ruins
As seen:
By Jess Walter
avg rating
2 reviews
A young innkeeper watches in disbelief as a beautiful American girl gets out of a boat and climbs towards his hotel. She turns out to be an actress, on the run from the shenanigans going on down the coast in Rome at the filming of Cleopatra. A few days later international star Richard Burton, much the worse for wear, appears in the village too.
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Jess Walter has written a novel that is very difficult to describe. It is a plot shifting, character entwining tale of love, pride and dignity. It begins in a run-down Italian village of the coast below Cinque Terre. It is a tribute to the concept of life is good enough. The characters run the gamut from old smelly fishermen to Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. It was cute, inventive but too non-sensical for my taste.
Not everyone managed to finish this months book, but this was simply due to lack of time rather than a feeling that they didn't want to finish it.
We felt that the writing was quite dense at times which made reading it a slow process although it was enjoyable at the same time.There seemed to be a lot of information given in the pages that took some time to take in. It was felt that some of the sections didn't seem to flow as well as others which also mean that it took some time to read.
As has been said in previous reviews, some of the book club members didn't enjoy the element of moving about it time between chapters. It became a little confusing trying to remember when and where we were in the timeline and who wa were following at times. We discussed whether this is the reason that most people do not read more than one book at once, as it gets confusing trying to get back into the story if you're jumping from different viewpoints or even different books.
Although the story was entirely fictional you could quite easily see something similar happening to a person such as Richard Burton. We liked that his character seemed to tally well with the impression we all had of him as a boy from Wales who struck it lucky and lived his life to the max. We loved reading about the love story between Burton and Liz Taylor, even though it was mostly fictional it was still interesting to see some behind the scenes elements that might just have happened. In fact Burton was one of our favourite characters along with Pasquale who we felt was really very sweet and such a gentleman when the chips were down. Obviously we loathed two characters being Galfredo and his hired thug and we were rather glad to read about what happened to them. We njoyed the character of Deane, he seemed to be some kind of Derren Brown type because he seemed to be able to mind read and give people what they actually wanted rather than what they thought they wanted.
Overall we gave this book 6 out of 10.
