Hello everyone,
I hope you have all been enjoying this months book. Here are some questions for you to think about before Thursday!
• The book's opening is reminiscent of a lush, epic romantic film—the beautiful dying Dee Moray steps off the boat and into Pasquale's heart. Although the book veers off new directions, is it still a love story? What kinds of love are presented in the novel? What, ultimately, does the novel have to say about love?
• The book's timeline, locales, different voices and unusual text treatments (Hollywood film pitch, biography, unfinished novel, how-to book) are jumbled. Did you find it confusing, hard to follow, irritating? Or was the variety intriguing? What might the author be hoping to achieve by scrambling everything up? How would the book be different if it were told in chronological order with a straightforward narrator?
• What is the significance of the novel's title? (It was first used by a journalist to describe Richard Burton many years after his marriage to Taylor.) Who else, or what, are the "beautiful ruins"?
• The first sentence in the final chapter begins with Michael Deane proclaiming “This is a love story.” The chapter then reveals the stories of most of the characters in the book, ending with Pasquale and Dee. Discuss how their stories are lives, as the title suggests, of beauty and ruins.
I hope you have all been enjoying this months book. Here are some questions for you to think about before Thursday!
• The book's opening is reminiscent of a lush, epic romantic film—the beautiful dying Dee Moray steps off the boat and into Pasquale's heart. Although the book veers off new directions, is it still a love story? What kinds of love are presented in the novel? What, ultimately, does the novel have to say about love?
• The book's timeline, locales, different voices and unusual text treatments (Hollywood film pitch, biography, unfinished novel, how-to book) are jumbled. Did you find it confusing, hard to follow, irritating? Or was the variety intriguing? What might the author be hoping to achieve by scrambling everything up? How would the book be different if it were told in chronological order with a straightforward narrator?
• What is the significance of the novel's title? (It was first used by a journalist to describe Richard Burton many years after his marriage to Taylor.) Who else, or what, are the "beautiful ruins"?
• The first sentence in the final chapter begins with Michael Deane proclaiming “This is a love story.” The chapter then reveals the stories of most of the characters in the book, ending with Pasquale and Dee. Discuss how their stories are lives, as the title suggests, of beauty and ruins.
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