Two books

"Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter.  Oh, this book had me before I even read the first sentence.  On the page before the prose begins there is a little sketched map of the Cinque Terra in Italy, with a tiny fake town added just for the book.  Having fallen in love with the Cinque Terra more than fifteen years ago, I was immediately smitten with this story.  It spans at least fifty years, jumps between Europe and the United States, hops from 1962 to the present and then back to years in between.  Two central characters have a handful of others revolving around them, and a couple of famous people are tossed in for charm and a kind of realistic intrigue.  The plot revolves around a beautiful young actress stranded in 1962 in a tiny dull Italian town, waiting for the knight in shining armor to rescue her.  He doesn't.  She moves on.  But her few days of waiting in that tiny dull Italian town have far reaching consequences.

I loved this book, its meandering pace, its brilliantly honed characters, its emotional gut-shots. There are scenes in Rome, Portland, Hollywood, Edinburgh, London and, of course, northern Italy.  Loving, living and losing, and finally getting it, getting the point, getting to tell your own story, your own way. "And he felt like he might burst open and he lacked the dexterity in English to say all that he was thinking - how in his estimation, the more you lived, the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe."  And  "It's a life with no shortage of moments to recommend it, a life that picks up speed like a boulder rolling down a hill, easy and natural and comfortable, yet beyond control somehow; it all happens so fast, you wake a young man and at lunch are middle-aged and by dinner you can imagine your death."  Who hasn't felt that, like all your life has zipped by, almost without you having any control over it, yet you consider yourself almost happy?  Or at least happy enough? 

I highly recommend "Beautiful Ruins."  It is almost perfect. I had tears in my eyes near the end and as I turned the last page, I was terribly disappointed that it ended. I so wanted to keep reading about Dee and Pat and Lydia and Pasquale.  Check it out, if you can.  It is almost worth buying a copy, and you know how rarely I say that.


"This Is Where I Leave You" by Jonathan Tropper. If you haven't read any Tropper's works, go to the library and get one of his books. This is his latest and it is funny, wise and irreverent. His characters are all over the map, from bitter to sweet, from dysfunctional to the picture of logic and sanity. But mostly they are pretty screwed up, just like real people! They fall in love with the wrong people (or the wrong people fall in love with them,) they are riddled with guilt about their lifetimes of mistakes (or have no morals at all,) they are plagued by their family relationships (or haunted by dead parents) and basically just trying to scrabble through life without too much bodily injury. Tropper writes laugh-out-loud dialogue and creates scenarios that seem too outlandish to be true, but it all sounds vaguely familiar, like some plot twist of our own lives that we try hard to forget. I love his books, his characters, his fucked-up families.








'