“Beautiful Ruins”: 2012′s best audiobook narration

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 19:31:00 +0000

Literary fiction must be the most challenging genre for an audiobook narrator. The actor is typically expected to alternate between finely wrought, cliche-free passages of description -- which, if done right, won't sound much like natural speech -- and (hopefully) believable lines of dialogue. When the contrast between the two is especially pronounced, as with Kevin Powers' recent Iraq novel, "The Yellow Birds," it takes an exceptional performer to pull it off, as Holter Graham does, and masterfully. (I just wish I liked Powers' book more.) More often, an actor who has been chosen for his or her marvelous personality or timbre is weaker at one or the other. The flights of metaphor sound awkward or the conversations flat, and you can never quite fall into the book.

All of which is to explain why this week's Listener singles out not a brand-new release but one from earlier this year: Edoardo Ballerini's narration of Jess Walter's "Beautiful Ruins." Walter narrated his last novel, "The Financial Lives of the Poets," himself, and splendidly, but you can see why a pro was called in this time around. "Financial Lives" was the first-person account of one man's flame-out in the recent economic crisis, a compact novel strongly tinted by the main character's acidic gloom. "Beautiful Ruins" ranges wider in time and space, beginning in Italy in 1962 and hopping back and forth from a tiny coastal town there to modern-day Los Angeles and the Midwest.

Salon.com > Beautiful Ruins

“Beautiful Ruins”: 2012′s best audiobook narration