Review: I really liked this book.
The story opens in 1962 with a young innkeeper at the Hotel Adequate View
working on his little beach in a remote part of Italy. Unexpectedly a beautiful
young American actress arrives to escape from the problems in her world. From
this inauspicious beginning a great love is born, but not in the traditional
Hollywood way. The story then skips ahead 50 years to the modern day and
we start to catch up on some of the players from that small beginning.
The rest of the book visits with either the main characters, or the people whose lives have been directly affected by them over the intervening years. Walter then returns back to the beginning (or sometimes the past) and continues the origin story, demonstrating how the present is greatly influenced by even the small decisions of the past.
By the end of the book both the past and the present come into congruence with each other and form a chaotic mess, an absolute Pollock of a life, with all its dead-ends and side trips. But you really begin to see it is their life and it’s beautiful. I find the title very true, our lives as confused and messy as they can be are ours; beauty is to be found in the scars and not the contrived perfect moments.
Our heroine arrived at the Hotel Adequate View to find solitude in her struggles, to be encompassed by its beauty as she died. Fifty years later she returns once again, having faced her reality, lived it, loved it, and now truly ready to accept it. Unhappiness is caused by dissatisfaction, always striving for a perfection that is not to be found in real life. In Beautiful Ruins Jess Walter has portrayed a hard and often disappointing life, and shown how it outshines even the best work of fiction. It is a great message for all of us to appreciate the real beauty that all of us possess. We may not be on the mountain tops, but in our personal Hotel Adequate Views we can find true happiness. In the end it will be all that any of us will have.
Beautiful Ruins is a beautiful celebration of life. Definitely add this to your must read list, you will not be sorry.
The rest of the book visits with either the main characters, or the people whose lives have been directly affected by them over the intervening years. Walter then returns back to the beginning (or sometimes the past) and continues the origin story, demonstrating how the present is greatly influenced by even the small decisions of the past.
By the end of the book both the past and the present come into congruence with each other and form a chaotic mess, an absolute Pollock of a life, with all its dead-ends and side trips. But you really begin to see it is their life and it’s beautiful. I find the title very true, our lives as confused and messy as they can be are ours; beauty is to be found in the scars and not the contrived perfect moments.
Our heroine arrived at the Hotel Adequate View to find solitude in her struggles, to be encompassed by its beauty as she died. Fifty years later she returns once again, having faced her reality, lived it, loved it, and now truly ready to accept it. Unhappiness is caused by dissatisfaction, always striving for a perfection that is not to be found in real life. In Beautiful Ruins Jess Walter has portrayed a hard and often disappointing life, and shown how it outshines even the best work of fiction. It is a great message for all of us to appreciate the real beauty that all of us possess. We may not be on the mountain tops, but in our personal Hotel Adequate Views we can find true happiness. In the end it will be all that any of us will have.
Beautiful Ruins is a beautiful celebration of life. Definitely add this to your must read list, you will not be sorry.
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 978-06-192812-3
Copyright: 2012
Pages: 352
Quick Review: 4.5 stars (out of 5)
Where I Obtained the Book: Sent by the publisher for review.
Synopsis: 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.
Author Biography: Jess Walter is the
author of five novels and one nonfiction book. His work has been translated
into more than 20 languages and his essays, short fiction, criticism and
journalism have been widely published, in Details, Playboy, Newsweek, The Washington
Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston
Globe among
many others.
Other Reviews:
I love the name of the hotel. :)
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