"Beautiful Ruins"

[fiefoe]

This book is somehow less than the sum of its various parts. But an Italian novel and a male author ("Jess Walter" confused me a bit at first) -- I'm breaking two of my streaks! (And like "Where'd You Go, Bernadette", it's very west coast based.)

• Carlo and Antonia—already forty when Pasquale was born—raised Pasquale like a secret between them.
• After weeks of unnatural kindness, the gentle mockery was a relief, the bursting of storm clouds above the village. Life was back to normal.
• Rather, he found himself inhabiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment.
• He had never really mastered English, but he’d studied enough to have a healthy fear of its random severity, the senseless brutality of its conjugations; it was unpredictable, like a cross-bred dog.
• the whole world suddenly seemed so unlikely, our time in it so brief and dreamlike. He’d never felt such a detached, existential sensation, such terrifying freedom—it was as if he were hovering above the village, above his own body
• Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.
• Pitching was a form unto itself, a kind of existential, present-tense performance art. <> To pitch here is to live. People pitch their kids into good schools, pitch offers on houses they can’t afford.
• of course she’s just happy to find his reservation. We live in a world of banal miracles.
• It’s a key sub-tenet of Shane’s movie-inspired ACT-as-if faith in himself: his generation’s profound belief in secular episodic providence, the idea—honed by decades of entertainment—that after thirty or sixty or one hundred and twenty minutes of complications, things generally work out.
• “The moment that lasts forever,” Shane says quietly. “Yes,” Pasquale says, and nods. “Forever.” Claire feels pinched by those words in such close proximity, moment and forever.
• Lugo the Promiscuous War Hero, famous for the dubious claim that he had killed at least one soldier from every major participant in the European theater of World War II.
• She shot him a glance from the corner of her eye. “It is a saying.” “No. It’s not a saying. There is no saying such as that. Did you and Papa drown my cat while I was in Florence?” “I’m sick, Pasqo! Why do you torment me?"
• Life seemed inevitable, like rising out of water. All I had to do was hold my breath and rise all the way to the surface. To some kind of fame or happiness or
• “Words and emotions are simple currencies. If we inflate them, they lose their value, just like money. They begin to mean nothing. <> Words and feelings are small now—clear and precise. Humble like dreams.
• Such a horrible formality, the end of a war.
• The black-market economy of German war trophies depended on such deception: retreating, starving Germans trading their broken weapons and their identifying insignia to starving Italians for bread, and the starving Italians in turn selling them as trophies to Americans like Richards and me, starved for proof of our heroism.
• I ached for my own son, for the heir I would never have, for someone to redeem the life I was already planning to waste. And when Richards’s God-sweet boy
• She could do that for any state you named, so many American boys in her hospital had taken time to reminisce about the place they came from, often before they died.
• and I buried my face between those breasts as if her skin were my home, as if Wisconsin lay there, and to this day, it is the greatest place I have ever been, that narrow ribbed valley between those lovely hills.
• Years passed and I found myself still a husk, still in that moment, still in the day my war ended, the day I realized, as all survivors must, that being alive isn’t the same thing as living. There you go.
• the vision he’d always had, of a flat court hovering over the sea, rising from the cliff-side boulders, a perfect cantilevered shelf covered with players in white clothes, women sipping drinks under parasols.
• tennis. Every point ended with someone missing; it seemed both cruel and, in some way, true to life.
• So he does his best, he squirms against the snow and the wind and his own animal hungers, and this is a life.
• The other fishermen yelled that it either wasn’t getting spark or wasn’t getting fuel, then those who’d said spark switched to fuel and fuel to spark. Something came over Richard Burton then and he stood and, in a deep, resonant voice, addressed the three old fishermen yelling from the shore. “Fear not, Achaean brothers.
• grubby little career / those lovely wrecked lives /
• “About what?” she asked. “It’s about the war,” he answered. “Korea?” she asked, innocently enough, and Alvis realized just how pathetic he’d become.
• He knew now what his book would be: an artifact, incomplete and misshapen, a shard of some larger meaning. And if his time with Maria was ultimately pointless—a random encounter, a fleeting moment, perhaps even the wrong whore—then so be it.
• “Your mother wanted you to marry Elizabeth Taylor?” “No. The other one,” Pasquale said, switching to English, as if such things could only be believed in that language. “She come to the hotel, three days. She make a mistake to come here.” He shrugged.
• Dick wanted Liz. Liz wanted Dick. And we want car wrecks. We say we don’t. But we love them. To look is to love.
• I was suggesting burning the whole town down to save this one house. If I pulled this off people would see our picture not in spite of the scandal but because of it. After this you could never go back. Gods would be dead forever.
• These are first-person memories—I memories. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief
• “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!”
• knew that someone had loved her so much that he painted her twice on the cold cement wall of a machine-gun pillbox.
• Old Lugo was walking down the narrow trail toward them, still in his fish-cleaning slicks, pushing the bolt to send another cartridge into his rifle, a green branch hanging from the dirty barrel of his weapon, which he must have pulled from his wife’s garden.
• true quests aren’t measured in time or distance anyway, so much as in hope. There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant—sail for Asia and stumble on America—and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along.
• To have a life reduced like that to some loose sheets of paper: it feels a little profane, a little exhilarating. The investigator
• unlikely travelers compelled along in a vehicle sparked on the gaseous fuel of spent life.
• “His general concept is that every design form has an innate maturity alongside its youthful nature"
• “Pasqo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.
• There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. —Milan Kundera
• Lydia who makes all of the rest of the odd bits come together as a life.
• (Fiction has the power to slow time, to speed it up, to dilate it, to flash it forward and back, to make it as precise as today’s date) (has the most stored energy in the moment right before it acts (think of a drawn bow)— was true of romance, too, if potential wasn’t, in some way, love’s most powerful form.) (the power of certain moments in our lives. These are the ruins of our memories, which loom in our minds like the Parthenon, even as they are decayed and weathered by time and regret. I hoped to convey the significance of such isolated moments in our lives,)