This is the first book I 'read' on Audible. It had been sitting on my bedside table in hard copy for an awfully long time, unread. In fact, worse than that, it traveled with me from Australia, throughout Malaysia and Europe, to arrive with us in Toronto, without me having read more than the first chapter. What a waste! It is truly such a fun book I'm surprised I didn't get into it during our travels. I think the reason I didn't, though, is that it's one of those books in which the narrator changes from chapter to chapter. As a result, the story jumps around considerably. In this case the shifting nature of the narration works, but initially I resisted it. I like settling into a story. If the narrator, the setting, and the time period change too frequently, the flow of reading is seriously interrupted. Each chapter is like starting again.
When I downloaded Audible, this was my first purchase. And it was a perfect book to listen to. The narrative flow didn't matter as much out loud - it became more like a movie. Interestingly, we are accustomed to switching quickly between disjointed scenes in performative art forms. It doesn't feel as uncomfortable as it sometimes does on the page.
As I mentioned in my previous post on audio books, listening to a book rather than reading it adds a new dimension. The interpretation of the book by the person who records it is vital to one's enjoyment as a 'reader'. In this case, the narration was done by Eduardo Ballerini, who was unknown to me. He had a serious challenge on his hands. The story of Beautiful Ruins moves fluidly across continents and time periods. The many nationalities and corollary accents include Italian, American, Irish, English, and Russian. And Ballerini handled all of this very well. So well, in fact, that I giggled to myself frequently while listening - the narrative often succeeded in absorbing me to the extent that I forgot I was in public.
In spite of the rather garish looking cover, Beautiful Ruins is not a chick lit offering. It is a sweeping tale, covering a period from the 1960s until present-day, in places as diverse as Hollywood and remote coastal Italy, and featuring a wide range of protagonists including the charismatic Richard Burton.
The story starts in 1962, when beautiful American movie starlet Dee Moray arrives by boat in the remote (and fictional) coastal village of Porto Vergogna. Local hotelier Pasquale watches as the glamorous blonde steps onto shore. Nothing so exciting has ever happened before in his life.
Many years later, a now elderly Pasquale arrives at a studio in Los Angeles, looking for the woman he fell in love with so many years before. He encounters a man he has met before, the gruff movie producer Michael Deane, who Walter paints as a deliberate caricature of Hollywood absurdity. His face has had so much cosmetic work done he looks "like a 9-year-old Filipino girl". This kind of descriptive vigour is one of the strengths of the book - it's funny. Like really funny, laugh out-loud funny. Funnier than you think it will be, and at the most unexpected times - although it's difficult for me to say whether I would have found it quite so entertaining had I not had the benefit of Ballerini's take on Walter's script. And I use the word 'script' deliberately - in some ways, this does read like a script. I can see this as a movie and I guess I'm not alone, because I believe it has already been made into one, to be released later in 2014.
So much happens in this book that it is quite impossible to compress into a succint review. Walter takes us through the travails of filming the epic Cleopatra in Rome, to the tempestuous relationship between Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, to a washed-up former drug addict's attempts to reinvigorate his music career through comedy at the Edinburgh Festival. We meet a writer pitching his script, an assistant producer on the day she might quit her dream job, a novelist whose single story idea takes him back again and again to the last days of 'his' World War II. At its heart, yes, this is a love story. But it is so much more than that.
Walter is a good enough writer to pull all of this off with aplomb. It is not high literature, as such, but each character is skilfully portrayed and the many threads of the story are tied together in a satisfying finale. Beautiful Ruins left me thinking I would eagerly read whatever Walter wrote next. Having said that, I am not so keen that I will run out to find his previous five novels and devour them.
Overall assessment: A great read, well written, imaginative. 4 out of 5.
Notes on reading with Audible: As I said above, this book was really funny. Unfortunately, because I listened to it in audio form, I don't have highlighted passages to take me back through this dense novel and pick out favourite (or problematic) bits. Sometimes days would go by where I couldn't find time to listen to my book, and I would read something else instead. Sometimes I would pick up the hard copy version of this novel in order to re-read a passage, or to remind myself of something that happened. It was an unusual reading experience for me, and it took me much longer to get through this book than had I just persisted with the paper version. Having said that, I'm glad I listened to it - the voices will stay with me, and I do believe that Ballerini's performance added something to my enjoyment of the book. But having the hard copy handy as a companion to the audio book was key.
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