“Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.”
I fell a little bit in love with a book whilst on my latest holiday to Kalkan in Turkey. It’s pretty much the perfect ‘beach read’, in that it covers off a brilliant story in a unique way that crosses continents, cultures and narrative devices, keeping you turning every page as you lie in the sun (or cuddle up in front of the fire as Autumn fully approaches us now!)
This book is by Jess Walter, author of previous bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets and is called Beautiful Ruins – a book about love, life and the often narcissistic nature of self and identity.
Commenting on the past, present and the future, it’s set within both 1960’s Southern Italy and today’s Hollywood – a brilliant comparison of place that provides a witty and satirical view on today’s obsession with movies, money and how we go about finding happiness and fulfilment in life.
The beautiful chocolate box town teetering on the cliff’s edge on the cover is Porto Vergogne (“Port of Shame”), a tiny Italian fishing village completely isolated except by boat. Owner of the one dingy hotel, the ‘Hotel Adequate View’, is Pasquale Tursi – a dreamy young man waiting for life to come and find him, lonely and living with his sick mother and bitter aunty. But Pasquale’s life is instantly turned on its head when one day, the arrival of a Hollywood actress, Dee Moray, throws his dull life into technicolour.
This striking Amercian actress is working in Rome on the set of the most talked-about picture in decades, Cleopatra. The story Jess Walter creates is a clever mix of fact and fiction, based on real life events such as the filming of this infamous movie and features real-life characters such as the movie’s star Richard Burton.
Dee is only a small part in the movie, and has come to Porto Vergogne — or rather, has been sent there to get out of the way — because she has just been diagnosed with “cancer” (a scandalous pregnancy). Just as we’re acclimatizing to this engaging story, suddenly there is a jerk away from the romance and subtle attraction of 1962 Italy to present-day Los Angeles, to a completely different scene involving the nasty world of Hollywood deals and pitches. Here we meet big shot producer Micheal Deane, who is in his seventies from a different sort of Hollywood, has a face full of plastic surgery and is instantly unlikeable.
From now on, we are flipped around like a fish out of water into different time periods, locations and the use of different narrative forms. One section of the book is solely the first chapter of a novel that has been written by the only other guest of Pasquale’s hotel in the story, and features some of the most moving writing on WW2 I have read in a long time.
But this back and forth is easy to follow as the threads of the different characters begin to patchwork. Along your journey with this book you’ll meet a modern day TV/film producer in Hollywood yearning for more than commissioning reality TV shows, a young musician on the path of self-destruction, Richard Burton spouting Shakespeare soliloquies and Italian fisherman and their simple ways of quiet town life. The novel’s conclusion shows how all of these lives are linked to this one event back in 1962 – Dee’s arrival at the small port in Italy. Ultimately, this myriad of characters are all searching for the same thing – for real happiness, with a real desire to embrace “the sweet lovely mess that is life.”
Jess Walter grapples with the big themes in this novel (love, war, regret, happiness) but does so in a thoroughly modern and engaging way. What’s even more exciting is that the novel has been optioned for a movie version and one of my all-time favourite directors, Todd Field, has signed up to direct and co-write the screenplay with author Jess Walter. This book should firmly be on your Christmas lists fellow book lovers!
“But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start.”
LMNH x
