![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/tumblr_m66fcuezWU1r5ik1zo1_500-393x600.jpg\" "\\"tumblr_m66fcuezWU1r5ik1zo1_500\\"")
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It’s been a long time since we took time to tout a tome.\u00a0 It’s not like we’ve stopped reading, but there just simply aren’t enough posts in a day (reasonable minds may differ). Simply put, Jess Walter’s<\/strong> most recent book, Beautiful Ruins<\/strong><\/em>, is the most enjoyable read we’ve had in quite some time.\u00a0 If you need a great novel to finish out the summer’s days, this is it.<\/p>\n Jess Walter<\/strong> is an award-winning storyteller (Citizen Vance, The Zero<\/strong>) who is facile in all genres, including non-fiction.\u00a0 But with Beautiful Ruins<\/strong><\/em>, he’s outdone himself.\u00a0 Walter introduces us to a dozen characters whose lives are, knowingly and unknowingly, intertwined over a span of 70 years, ranging from a dying actress and Richard Burton on a movie set and elsewhere in Italy in 1962, to an Italian innkeeper, to a Hollywood producer, to the producer’s idealistic assistant, to a heartbroken World War II veteran.\u00a0 Together with their spouses, lovers, progeny and friends, Walter weaves a tale of success, failure, heartbreak, resignation and resolve.\u00a0 You know:\u00a0 life.\u00a0 In the course of doing so, Walter uses every literary trick in the proverbial book to capture the human condition, though all in service of the story and never merely for show.\u00a0 Early on, the chapters alternate between the various eras to great effect.\u00a0 Eventually Walter uses virtually all literary tropes available to tell the tale:\u00a0 poetry, short story, movie pitch-piece, memoir, play, screenplay…they’re all there.\u00a0 And all are used in service of the captivating storylines.\u00a0 If it sounds at all mechanical, it is not.\u00a0 The highly entertaining pages fly by.\u00a0 Walter is at his best capturing conversation and using pathos and bathos (some of Burton’s lines had us laughing aloud) to illumine the characters and their interlaced lives.\u00a0 And he does it so well and so deftly that you won’t realize how entertained you’ve been in the process.<\/p>\n We will be shocked if, as a result of this must-read novel, Walter doesn’t take home many of the literary prizes available for 2012.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s been a long time since we took time to tout a tome.\u00a0 It’s not like we’ve stopped reading, but there just simply aren’t enough posts in a day (reasonable minds may differ). Simply put, Jess Walter’s most recent book, Beautiful Ruins, is the most enjoyable read we’ve had in quite some time.\u00a0 If you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11888\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelefortreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}