Beautiful Ruins

Summary (from the publisher): 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.

Review: I received a copy of this book from Harper Collins. 

Beautiful Ruins spans the years from 1962 to the present day, travels from Italy to America, and introduces the lives of a multitude of characters who are all linked ultimately because of a series of events that Richard Burton set in motion when he slept with a young actress on the set of Cleopatra.  From the Italian innkeeper (Hotel Adequate View) Pasquale, actress Dee Moray, to film producer Michael Deane and his assistant Claire, this novel confronts the reality of of human flaws and how the course of every life is unpredictable and often far different than what is wished and hoped for. 

One of my favorite aspects of this book, aside from the beautiful cover image, is the unique collection of different genres that make up its pages. Each chapter shifts in narrative voice, location, and time period. In addition, the novel includes excerpts from a movie pitch about the failed Donner party, the first chapter of a novel about World War II, the rejected opening of a memoir, a play, a comedy sketch, and a movie script. It's hard to get bored with so much going on in one novel. In essence, this novel is focusing on creative voice and, more specifically, on fame. This was reinforced by the references to the movie set of Cleopatra and Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor and references to behind the scenes of movie making in Hollywood. The struggling musicians, playwrights, actresses, and authors in its pages are all hoping to make it big, but unfortunately, many are caught in the crisis of their own human frailties and fail to succeed. 

My greatest frustration in this book is that I did not think the central conflict was compelling enough. This novel certainly has all the makings of greatness including actor's illegitimate children, movie sets, and the Italian seaside. However, I thought Walter was leading up to some great reveal and resolution with Dee Moray in the final conclusion of the novel, and the book never really followed through in this regard.

Additionally, one huge downside to the many voices and characters is that I felt like I only got a glimpse of each character. The two characters most focused on seemed to be Pasquale in 1962 Italy and Claire in present day Hollywood. However, I wish a deeper character development could have taken place throughout the whole novel for more of the characters. This book read like a film script in that it felt very visual and lacked more introspective and internal insight.

Stars: 3