By Jess Walter
the tale starts in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian sea coast, a tender innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, seems out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, skinny girl, a imaginative and prescient in white, impending him on a ship. She is an actress, he quickly learns, an American starlet, and she or he is loss of life.
And the tale starts back this present day, part an international away, while an aged Italian guy indicates up on a film studio's again lot—searching for the mysterious girl he final observed at his resort a long time previous.
What unfolds is a blinding, but deeply human, curler coaster of a unique, spanning fifty years and approximately as many lives. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe competition, Walter introduces us to the tangled lives of a dozen unforgettable characters: the starstruck Italian innkeeper and his long-lost love; the heroically preserved manufacturer who as soon as introduced them jointly and his idealistic younger assistant; the military veteran grew to become fledgling novelist and the rakish Richard Burton himself, whose appetites set the full tale in motion—along with the husbands and other halves, fans and dreamers, superstars and losers, who populate their international within the many years that stick with. Gloriously artistic, continually remarkable, Beautiful Ruins is a narrative of fallacious but attention-grabbing humans, navigating the rocky shorelines in their lives whereas clinging to their unbelievable desires.
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Extra resources for Beautiful Ruins: A Novel
Sample text
Plan Languages across the Lifespan language receiver understands the concept of time. Normally, twoyear-olds are not very good at grasping the days of the week, and they are often even challenged by “before” and “after,” let alone abstracts such as Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Clearly, this was a strategy doomed to failure, at least until the children were old enough to understand how their languages were being divided. Different strategies work for different family circumstances. Oneperson one-language would also not be very successful if one of the parents was not around with enough frequency to give his or her language sufficient time with the children.
9 At other campuses research is underway, and more people from a variety of fields are beginning to share their knowledge about languages to seek new and better ways of helping people become multilingual. Cornell University’s Language Acquisition Lab and Virtual Center for the Study of Language Acquisition, for example, manages an ongoing exchange of brilliant minds in the field of foreign language acquisition. Their forum encourages people from linguistics, neurology, psychology, and education to join forces and combine their knowledge in search of improving the language acquisition process.
It is less natural for the brain to be forced to replace existing labels for concepts about the world than it is to ask the brain to add a new label to the concept. This is one of the strongest psychological arguments in favor of additive bilingualism, adding a new language, as opposed to subtractive bilingualism, in which the new language replaces the old. The process of becoming bilingual from birth is where we turn next. All people brought up bilingual from birth learn to speak their languages, whereas only some go on to learn to read and write.