home |
| BEAUTIFUL RUINS | JESS WALTER | HARPERCOLLINS | 2012 |
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.
Beautiful Ruins is a story about people. The book takes place throughout a span of fifty years, introducing new settings and characters with each turn of the page.
I'm still not sure how I feel about this book. I absolutely loved the sections set in 1962, but the contemporary plot lines bored me at times. The story of an American actress filming her very first movie in Rome, wrapped around the fingers of a man in power, had me captivated. I loved the dialect of the Italians trying to translate their thoughts into English and the relationship between the actress and the hotel owner was organic.
The contemporary settings took place in Hollywood, offering a look into the world of movie pitches and once glamorous directors now fallen from fame. We also learn the story of an assistant trying to make her own career in a busy industry and a screenwriter trying to do the same with his absurd movie idea.
Books, films, and TV shows set in the 1950's and 1960's are a personal favourite, so I was always eager for Beautiful Ruins to go back to telling stories of the past. That being said, Jess Walter is an incredible writer and this book is truly unique. While it wasn't one of my favourites, I recommend reading it for yourself. The reviews for this book are consistently positive and many people named it their favourite book of 2012.
Home
Post a Comment