Beautiful ruins

Beautiful Ruins is a sprawling saga of a novel which takes places across two timelines, mostly in present-day Hollywood and 1960s southern Italy. While billed as a 'very, very funny' 'monument to love', I found it to be a rather over-played and self-indulgent story - albeit with fabulous cover art by Kelly Anna. It is amusing in parts and kept me entertained throughout a day so hot that I little enthusiasm to do anything but read, but I was dismayed at the gap between the high praise this book has received - along with numerous reprints - and the reality of actually reading it. Perhaps I need to be more of a Hollywood fan to appreciate it as satire?

I did like the idea of exploring so many 'what if' scenarios and missed opportunities. Characters talk about time passing them by while they wait for the 'movie of their lives to begin' and that is a particular theme of the book. Unfortunately most of the characters aren't particularly likeable. The Italian people are idealised so much as to practically be caricatures and there's a strange, long section following the antics of a drunken Richard Burton. In fact, Beautiful Ruins is padded out a number of times with strange additions that did nothing to further the central story - one chapter from a character's unwritten novel, another from a second character's autobiography, a play script recapping what we had already learned in detail about a third character. I wasn't sure why we needed these diversions as they slowed down the novel considerably.

All in all, I'm not really sure what to make of Beautiful Ruins. Some scenes are inspired, others just read as filler, and Walter's attempts to get as many tear-jerking happy-ever-afters into the ending quickly became nauseating! I think I'll chalk this novel up to 'worth a try, but not my style' and pass on any more of his novels.

There's nugget of a novella in the midst of this that is really intriguing - the story that takes place in 1962 on the Italian coast. If this novel were just that story, I'd rate it quite a bit higher.

The added characters and their stories are more than just padding, I think. To some extent, it seems an attempt to emulate Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I almost [almost] hated. Like that book, there are a few nasties in Beautiful Ruins who have to have their story told. The bigger problem, though, is that the purpose of all these extras is to model the reactions the author wants the reader to have. Pasquale has a 50-year-old tale to tell that is so poignant that the Hollywood-types listening are gob-smacked. Characters are moved to tears by a play they watch. A character reads a lone first chapter and then weighs in on its glories. All of these things would be directed at you, the reader, instead of other characters if the author were more confident in the power of the work. It's akin to rambling through an anecdote, finishing with "I guess you had to be there", and finding a witness to corroborate how wondrous the event had been.

In the 2013 Tournament of Books, Beautiful Ruins should fall to any of the competitors I've read so far.