This novel chronicles the lives of various characters and is highly fictional, even including fictional portrayals of the very real Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as chief players in the lives of others. Somehow all of these people - cinema stars, Italians, authors, actors, producers, porn-addicts - get connected to one another in this story of stories. Additionally, the book spans several decades from the 1960s to the present day (2012). A consistent theme is film and how it influences us. Nowadays the film industry is failing - good film is dead, because the good stories are gone. Film changes the way that we see the world, and as the industry has turned to 3D action films, raunchy comedies and reality television ... our faith is turning into a bitter taste of cynicism. Shane, a young wannabe Hollywood writer is on his way to pitch a film idea featuring cannibalism, and he has what can only be an epiphany:
"Weren't movies his generation's faith anyway - its true religion?
Wasn't the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but
emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience,
same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten
million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects
with a billion sermons - but the same movie showed in every mall
in the country. And we all saw it! That summer, the one you'll never
forget, every movie house beamed the same set of thematic and narrative
images - the same Avatar, same Harry Potter, same Fast and
Furious, flickering pictures stitched in our minds that replaced
our own memories, archetypal stories that became our shared history,
that taught us what to expect from life, that defined our values.
What was that but a religion?"
The main characters of this story are the fictional Pasquale Tursi, who we first meet as a young Italian man trying to run his deceased father's hotel - THE HOTEL ADEQUATE VIEW - and a young aspiring actress, Dee Moray, who we also meet in the first chapter as a young woman working on the movie Cleopatra with none other than Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The first chapter is beautiful and filled with visions of old Hollywood, and while our present day Shane remarks upon how film is "his generation's" religion, we learn quickly that even in the 1960s Pasquale and Dee also view film as their religion, their inspiration, and the thing that keeps them from living their own lives. As Pasquale reflects when he first sees the young actress arriving at his hotel, "Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination."
Dee and Pasquale slowly open up to each other despite some language barriers. Dee tosses her hair back and says "I've been thinking about how people sit around for years waiting for their lives to begin, right? Like a movie. You know what I mean? ... I know I felt that way. For years. It was if I was a character in a movie and the real action was about to start at any minute. But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of the lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start."
And then we realize that she's right. "And when our lives do begin? I mean, the exciting part, the action? It's all so fast." And then you're on the outside looking in. These two people discover one another, and then before they know it the action in their lives start, and we zoom forward to the present day where an elderly Pasquale is searching for the young actress he met years ago in Italy, in a town amidst the Cinque Terre called Porto Vergogna. And it is here in the "present day" that we start to see everyone's stories collide.
Stories are people. 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. Because being alive isn't the same thing as living. The present day search for Dee Moray isn't just an adventure, or a quest, it's everything. We fight the future as much as we fight the past, but there comes a time where you can't find your story anymore and you have to face it. You have to stop being an outsider looking in and live your story out before you wake up one day and it's over.
Beautiful ruins is a representation of ourselves. We are all eventually going to be beautiful ruins, a crumbling structure of the greatness we once were, and hopefully we're still enticing enough that people don't forget us. This novel is poetic, romantic, tragic, richly written, and oftentimes very funny. It's a touching novel. It didn't necessarily excite me as much as some of the other books I've read recently have. I finished this over a week ago, and it has taken me this long to write down my thoughts on it. While I would definitely recommend it to anyone as a good read worth diving into, it sometimes lacks the forward motion to keep you hungering for more, and sometimes because of the intermingling of so many stories and so many people searching for redemption it feels trite. Every person is searching for redemption or fighting for or against the future, and it gets to be a bit overused. And then yes, sometimes I had to applaud the author for tying everyone's stories together, to fight that loneliness that comes with life, but other times I had to look at the connections and go "really?" It's hard to believe some of the relationships, particularly the fictional relationship of real life stars to fake characters.
One minor character, Alvis, who is an author himself tells his beautiful wife that "All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character - what we believe - none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!" Life is a glorious catastrophe. We want what we want and we love who we love. We have to learn to live in the action and not wait for it to start and then miss it when it's there. We must bridge our desire between what we want and what is the right thing to do. Read this novel and judge for yourself who is beyond redemption and who deserves a second chance. Take time to connect to each individual story and then see how you feel when the stories intertwine. Judge the authenticity of those relationships for yourself, and please let me know what you think. This is a book worth discussing. Overall, I enjoyed their stories of love, life, loss, redemption, and learning to do the right thing ... or not.
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