Beautiful Ruins in Crazy Challenge Connection

May 09, 2013 Cathie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2013-reads, coffeeandbooks-botm, coffeeandbookschallenges, fictionfanatics-botm, favorites, historical-fiction, fiction, 2013-favorites, choiceawards2012, sisterhood-travelling-botm

A beautiful written love story, with all the required accompanying tragedy inherent in great love stories, spanning over 50 years. This is the love story of Pasquale's love for Dee Moore. This is the story of Dee's life and all the lives that intersect with her's.

Beautiful Ruins is a threaded narrative; a narrative which presents the story through a series of intertwined “threads.” These intertwined threads may have a different set of characters or they may occur in differing time frames or in d A beautiful written love story, with all the required accompanying tragedy inherent in great love stories, spanning over 50 years. This is the love story of Pasquale's love for Dee Moore. This is the story of Dee's life and all the lives that intersect with her's.

Beautiful Ruins is a threaded narrative; a narrative which presents the story through a series of intertwined “threads.” These intertwined threads may have a different set of characters or they may occur in differing time frames or in differing locales (and any combination of these). Each thread is presented one following the other, switching back and forth between them.

The writing is beautiful and poetic, lyrical with great riffs. The story is original and has everything. There's a reference for everybody and reminiscing about the memories these references invoke brought a smile to my face.

There's also lot's of old time Hollywood gossip for those who like to look in on other people's lives. The story begins with Dee Moore being sent from the film Cleopatra (1962) to make some decisions about her life after she is told she has stomach cancer. There's as much gossip about Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher and Hollywood spin as there is story about Pasquale and Dee and Richard Burton. (One of my laugh out loud lines is at the beginning of Chapter 11. Richard Burton drives like a serious fucking idiot, says Pasquale ~ paraphrased).

Dee Moore comes ashore at Porto Vergogna (Port of Shame) and Pasquale is struck by her beauty and mystery at first sight.

An Italian coastal town

Oh how I fell in love with Pasquale Tursi right from the beginning. He's a man of little words but a heart full of yearning. This is his quest to find the Dee he knew back in 1962. Beautiful Ruins is a beautiful story.

As Pasquale’s writer buddy tells him, “Stories are people. I’m a story, you’re a story … your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we’re lucky, our stories join into one, and for a while, we’re less alone.”

There are so many resonating truth lines throughout this book that I would be here quoting most of it for a very long time. Read it. It's worth your time. ...more

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Mar 30, 2018 BookishStitcher rated it liked it

For me this book was just okay. It suffered from way too many characters and side stories. So many that the idea of trying to give a brief description here feels daunting. The parts I enjoyed the most were the ones from the 60's in Italy. I would have loved more from that part especially around the filming of Cleopatra. Most of the characters in this book just felt like filler, and I didn't particularly care about reading their chapters. ...more

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Jul 14, 2013 Anne ✨ Finds Joy rated it really liked it

I wasn't surprised to learn the author took more than 11 years to complete this work, as it's a complex piece spanning 50 years and a multitude of settings and story lines. I was sometimes mystified at just how the author managed to make all the little pieces came together in this one, and how he even imagined the connections of the characters in the first place. But overall the settings and characters engaged me enough to enjoy the journey along with them. I was partial to the parts of the stor ...more

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Jan 05, 2014 Ritika rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2014, kolkata-collection-2016

It has been so long since I have picked up a "literary" book which is at once romantic, hopeful, stylistically brilliant and still capable of humour. This is a book people need to read to remember how human humans really are and how they are capable of so much good and so much wrong. Highly recommended! ...more

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Jul 15, 2015 Megalion rated it really liked it

Shelves: year-read-2016, from-shelfari, ccc-2016-countdown

The recent 404 errors in Shelfari have caused me to lose some of my reviews.

This is one from the "much talked about but I hadn't yet gotten around to reading" list for me. And was worth the read.

It's an odd mishmash of lives and periods. We have life in a very very tiny Italian town perched precariously on a cliff. An American writer. An American actress. Contemporary Hollywood with various assorted characters. How do they all connect? What adds an interesting extra dash of flavor is the use of ...more

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Jan 18, 2014 Karen rated it liked it

Shelves: literary-exploration-challenge

This was a good book about an awful lot of seriously flawed people though I'm not as wild about it as many others are. Fiction that involves story lines about real life people are a tough read for me and one of the main story lines in Beautiful Ruins involves a famous Hollywood actor. But that is my own hang up and not a reason not to read the book if you are so inclined. I guess I just didn't see enough beauty in the unrelenting ruins. ...more

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Nov 05, 2021 Maggie Shanley rated it it was ok

Shelves: suggested-for-me

This story made a nice circle from a small Inn with an Adequate view in Italy to Hollywood, to Idaho and back to Italy, but it dragged on a bit too much.

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