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    The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God
    The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God
    The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God
    Audiobook18 hours

    The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

    Written by Dallas Willard

    Narrated by Thomas Penny

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    The Divine Conspiracy has revolutionized how we think about the true meaning of discipleship. In this classic, one of the most brilliant Christian thinkers of our times and author of the acclaimed The Spirit of Disciplines, Dallas Willard, skillfully weaves together biblical teaching, popular culture, science, scholarship, and spiritual practice, revealing what it means to "apprentice" ourselves to Jesus. Using Jesus’s Sermon of the Mount as his foundation, Willard masterfully explores life-changing ways to experience and be guided by God on a daily basis, resulting in a more authentic and dynamic faith. 

    Editor's Note

    A tour de force…

    With inspired ingenuity, Willard weaves the spiritual, the scientific, and the societal together in this tour de force of living with God.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateFeb 6, 2007
    ISBN9780061341632
    Author

    Dallas Willard

    Dallas Willard was a professor at the University of Southern California's School of Philosophy until his death in 2013. His groundbreaking books The Divine Conspiracy, The Great Omission, Knowing Christ Today, Hearing God, The Spirit of the Disciplines, Renovation of the Heart, and The Divine Conspiracy Continued forever changed the way thousands of Christians experience their faith.

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    Reviews for The Divine Conspiracy

    4.5/5

    508 ratings161 reviews

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    • 4/5
      "This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life."- Jess Walter, "Beautiful Ruins"Jess Walter says "Beautiful Ruins," his break-through novel, was nearly finished before he knew what to call it, or perhaps even what it was all about. Then he came across a magazine article in which actor Richard Burton, then 54, was described as "already a beautiful ruin." And so, after 15 years of struggle, he had his novel, a gem that deserves all the attention it has received since its publication in 2012.Burton was already a minor, yet important, character in the story. He is the reason Dee Moray, a beautiful young American actress with a small part in "Cleopatra," shows up in a tiny Italian coastal village in 1962. She thinks she is dying of cancer. In truth she is pregnant with Burton's baby. Sent by a studio doctor to Switzerland for treatment, actually an abortion, she instead goes to Porto Vergogna. There Pasquale Tursi strives to turn his small hotel into a resort, complete with a cliff-side tennis court, that will appeal to American tourists. When this lovely actress shows up, he is smitten.The novel spans decades, and Walter goes back and forth in time, constantly tossing in seemingly unrelated narratives like a chapter of another novel and a pitch for a screenplay about the Donner party. Somehow it all works, and a reader's patience will be rewarded.Burton is not the novel's only "beautiful ruin." Most of the characters, Dee and Pasquale among them, live lives that fail to equal their dreams. When in the final chapters an aging Pasquale comes to America in search of an aging Dee Moray, by now truly dying of cancer, the ruins of their dreams become quite beautiful.
    • 3/5
      This book fell apart a bit for me in the middle (that Richard Burton storyline was......), but the beginning and the end were really lovely.
    • 2/5
      This was one one step (and a small step) above a popular romance type novel. I was pulled into it by the 4.5 stars on Amazon. It was likable enough. The filming of Cleopatra is very peripheral to this story of love. 7/24
    • 5/5
      It's hard to sum up exactly what this book is about--it jumps around in time and place and character. But please, friends, believe me when I tell you it is one of the most fantastic books I've read in a long time. Oh, so fantastic. It took me about two weeks to read because I have been so busy, but I didn't mind dragging out. I didn't want it to end!

      So fantastic. Read it. Right now! Hurry up.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful! Lots of threads of different stories and a story about stories.
    • 3/5
      I took away from this book the idea that despite the ruins that each of our individual lives could come to resemble toward the end, each of them is in some respect, beautiful. It's not really the most profound statement I've ever come across, or particularly original, but it does have a nice comforting feel to it. We all have struggles (even beautiful statuesque would-be movie actresses.) We may have a wild youth and come to appreciate aspects of life that would have been considered soul-crushingly mundane back when we were in our 20s. The characters were not so much likable as at least developed and readable. I enjoyed the book-honestly. It was a nice summer read. I would give Jess Walter about 50-50 for writing. I admit he had some brilliant one sentence winners-kind of like the perfect effortless lob that wins a hard fought tennis match. Makes you look like a natural. But there were some sentences that made me cringe too. A bit too "hip"-but then I am a really hard sell on these things. Case in point- if you want to be raw and crude, you really have to own it throughout the book or it seems a bit hard to buy and kind of sad. It's like wearing a killer outfit, and having the body to pull it off- but not having the confidence to really make it yours. But as I said, a good read, even though I am not even remotely interested in Hollywood or the whole Liz Taylor side show to this novel. I have to wonder-where did he come up with that idea? I'm amazed he was able to make it work as well as it did because when I read that was a "backdrop" to the novel I almost didn't want to read it. The cover is pure eye candy...not very fitting to the novel but half the reason I bought the book. Maybe 3/4 even.
    • 5/5
      I ended up loving this book because I loved the characters (some of them) and grew to appreciate the writing but sometimes it did feel like two books in one- a kind of so-so commercial melodrama set in Hollywood in the present day, and a soapy love story that almost had the feel of Corelli's Mandolin, set in the recent past about a sick actress, a lovelorn would-be hotelier and the beautiful Italian landscape. I know some people found the book manipulative and cheesy and I can see that in retrospect but in the moment I was totally won over.
    • 4/5
      Didn't really like it until half-way through the book, but then loved it.
    • 5/5
      Oh wow! Where to start? Well,as Carlo in "Beautiful Ruins" suggests, "“Perhaps you could write first the ending.”So OK, I cried myself to sleep at the end of this book. Actually I started sobbing about four chapters from the end and just wouldn't let up. It's not often that a book does that to me. Part of it was there were a lot of truths told in this book and part of it was that I knew the end was coming and I really didn't want to leave these characters.It's hard to start talking about the beginning because it's hard to know what the beginning really is. Each chapter is set in a different time from 1962 to the present to WWII to the Donner Party to others, and all of it weaves itself into a magical narrative about the nature of love--the love of your life, the love that could have been, the fantasy love--and life.I loved this book for that out of sequence aspect. I also loved it because some chapters were different formats altogether--screenplays, novels, biographies, plays--and again each of them uncovering just a bit more of the story so there was a continuous sigh of recognition and reconciliation. (Ah, I see now.)Be sure to read this book with someone else because you will want to discuss it over and over. A true page turner. I reluctantly and uncontrollably stayed up late to finish it. Highly recommended!
    • 4/5
      I was surprised by this book. Beautiful ruins is packaged like a "beach read" and I was expecting something on the light side, but the story really took hold and I was hooked. This story is both simple and complex, a story of what happened in Italy in the 1960s while Cleopatra was filming, and many stories that are connected to that. The plot weaves back and forth from the past to present, from Italy to America, and from the various characters who are all connected in some way. Highly enjoyable read.
    • 3/5
      I must be missing something here because I've seen this book touted as one of the best books of 2012. For me it was ok, but not earth shattering. It had the elements of an enjoyable read - interesting characters, humor, interesting setting - but somehow it didn't seem to all tie together for me. 3.5 stars, but no huge life changing moments for me.
    • 5/5
      Es una excelente obra que invita a una meditación y reflexión más profunda de la santa revelación escrita de Dios. Muchas gracias.
    • 5/5
      I really enjoyed this book. It was very encouraging and thoughtful.
    • 5/5
      This is the first novel I have read by Jess Walter and if his other work is comparable, I'm a fan! The words and plot flowed wonderfully back in forth between modern day and the 1960's. When I put this book down, I felt like I had seen and experienced the characters. I know these people and I'm fascinated by how author's can give the reader such a sense of knowing and familiarity to their characters.
    • 3/5
      I liked this book. Hard to put down; ambitious, but without trying to be more than it was; thoroughly consuming. Memorable? Maybe not. But made me very happy as I read it and seems to contain some particularly interesting, and sometimes touching, musings about life. Also, Italy! And Italian! Made me itch to travel. However, one of the biggest problems was that one of the main plot lines, a romantic relationship, just wasn't realistic to me. I couldn't quite buy it, and that took away a bit from the overall story for me.

      There was plenty of good in this book, and I highly recommend it for a fun summer read. Lots of little details make this enjoyable. I particularly liked that early in the book, a character suggests that perhaps their lives are like water going down a drain, whirling around and around until they reach the hole; and then the last chapter was a sort of epitaph that whirled around and touched on the lives of all the minor characters. The book ended when the whole thing finally went down the drain!
    • 4/5
      I was reluctant to read this only because it is so popular - however, I thoroughly enjoyed it - I'd give it a 4.5 stars. The changing of locale and stories kept me interested in reading the next section in order to get back to the last story.
    • 2/5
      I really wanted to like this book. I was disappointed.
    • 5/5
      This is a book I had heard a lot about in terms of its positive reviews and I may have gotten around to it eventually. However, it was available at the library so I took it out and was very glad that I did. It was that wonderful thing that I love best about books, entertaining, well written, and a good story. The characters were good and it was the type of book that makes me want to read more books by the author. I really recommend it although I would not label this a very complex book or deep literature. Just a funny entertaining story that covers 50 years and bounces between Italy and the US. A good read
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed the writing and the story of this book. I'm glad I persevered because the chapters switched not only persons but to the past and then present and involved a lot of characters and I would normally quit. But it was for my book group and well worth the effort. The book was about there are screen actors, a novelist, and Pasquale, an innkeeper, who keeps his patrons fed and watered on homemade wine and dreams. Among all the shimmer and hope are the lost souls who long to create something, anything. And just as Jess Walter introduces us to these characters, he follows them for fifty years. The journey will delight and captivate you.
    • 2/5
      Beautiful Ruins never took off for me. Its biggest flaw was how boredom-inducing it was. I can’t really think of much else to say, which reflects how little impact it had on me. It was so bland that I can’t even muster up enough energy to catalogue all the ways in which it didn’t work. Instead, I’ll list a few random points:

      --The treatment of one of the main themes, the life that one has versus the life that one could’ve had, was rather one-note. It was illustrated over and over again with each character, but without any additional insight. What’s the point? The storytelling felt amateurish and lightweight, which wouldn’t be notable (some books are beach reads and I just accept them for what they are) had I not expected more from Jess Walter based off of his last effort, The Financial Lives of Poets.

      --All of the characters aside from Dee and Pasquale were meaningless. Their stories added nothing save for more boredom. I could’ve gone along with Michael Deane’s story without too much fuss; I could’ve even tolerated (barely) Pat’s story without much complaint; but to also have Claire and that screenwriter crammed in there was absolutely unnecessary and uninteresting, killing what little patience I had for the book.

      --Weaving back and forth in time and between different characters is fine, but when you’re just shifting from one boring story to another boring story, then the reading experience just becomes even more tedious.
    • 5/5
      I have to admit that I really enjoy Jess Walter's writing -- especially his wit. I read this book on audio, which is ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL. Not sure I would have liked it quite so much without the splendid narration. Still, this book is a great achievement, with wonderfully woven stories set in numerous time periods and multiple continents. A pleasure to read.
    • 3/5
      I liked this book, but good grief, it irritated me at at times.

      It's set fifty years ago in Italy, and today mostly in Hollywood, with some side trips to points in between.

      It's 1962, and Pasquale Tursi, just twenty-one, has inherited the family inn from his father. It's a tiny, mostly empty inn, in a tiny hint of a village on the Genoa coast. He's also inherited his father's dream of making it into a resort for wealthy American tourists, and he's single-handedly trying to build a beach on the rocky coast by digging out the rocks and bringing in sand. He's chest-deep in water holding one of the rocks when a boat approaches, bringing in a beautiful, blonde, young American actress.

      Dee Moray has just started her film career, working on Cleopatra with the scandalous and exciting Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. She's just been told by a doctor that she has stomach cancer. A young publicist on the movie set, Michael Deane, has arranged for her to go to Switzerland for treatment, and in the meantime, he's send her to Porto Vergogna for rest and quiet, and to wait for the man she expects to join her there.

      In the next chapter, we are in Hollywood fifty years later, and the now legendary producer Michael Deane is not at the peak of his career, but he's making good money. His idealistic young assistant, Claire Silver, dreams of making great movies, but in fact she's working for a man who is, at this stage in his career, making crass but profitable reality tv shows. And once a month is "Wild Pitch Friday," when almost anyone might be coming into Claire's office to pitch almost any kind of idea. And on this particular Friday, at the end of the day when she just wants to leave, two men appear: Shane Wheeler, her last appointment of the day, and an elderly Italian man--Pasquale Tursi. Shane's there to pitch a movie about the Donner party, of cannibalism fame, but his Italian is better than Pasquale's English, and Shane translates for him.

      Fifty years later, Pasquale still has Michael Deane's business card, and he's here, at long last, wanting to find out what happened to Dee Moray, and if possible where she is.

      In alternating chapters, we follow the events of fifty years ago, as Dee, Pasquale, Deane, and others try to make useful decisions in a crisis. There's Dee's personal crisis, which is different than she thinks it is. There are the mafiosi from the nearby, larger, frankly more attractive resort town, who feel Pasquale has stolen a customer from them. Deane is trying to manage the unmanageable Burton and Taylor to keep the scandalous publicity the right kind of scandal to promote the movie rather than kill it.

      I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that Deane is amazingly self-absorbed and not at all a nice guy.

      And we follow the events in the present day, as Pasquale seeks news of what happened to Dee, Claire tries to find a way to be true to her dreams while making a living, and Shane tries to prove to himself that he has a future in movies.

      We also follow the difficult, struggling career of Pat Bender, Dee's son, and his girlfriend who has realized she just can't fix him, and has to take care of herself and the others who depend on her.

      Pasquale, Dee, Pasquale's American friend Alvis, and a number of others try hard to do the right thing and to make the best decisions they can. Then there are the others, like Deane. Richard Burton has a small role, and tries not to be a total jerk, but if he weren't a scandal-ridden drunk, some of the problems would never arise.

      I've enjoyed a lot of non-linear story-telling, but the jumping around here often seems scattershot. Even allowing for that, a plot is hard to find. I do like the characters, who are well-done, and that's what kept me with the book to the end.

      My taste for literary fiction is limited, and that's part of my problem with this book. If you like literary fiction, you may find more here than I did.

      I bought this book.
    • 3/5
      Life is a film. You may often hear people say, “that only happens in movies,” yet in Beautiful Ruins, Walter tells us that each of our lives is a cinematic wonder, a staging of beauty and sorrow. But I don’t believe this. Life (and good literature, which should reproduce human life) is separate from film. That division, the division between the fantastical la-la land of movies and the harshness of reality, is important to me, so this book failed on a major level.

      To present this theme to the reader, Walter writes his book almost like a screenplay and mixes fictional Hollywood characters with an actual Hollywood storyline concerning the love affair between Liz Taylor and Richard Burton during the filming of nightmare movie Cleopatra. A sample of the writing: Not quite thirty, Shane Wheeler is tall, lean, and a little feral-looking, narrow face framed by an ocean-chop of brown hair and two table-leg sideburns. For twenty minutes, Shane has been coaxing an outfit from this autumn-leaf pile of discarded clothes: wrinkly polos, quirky secondhand Ts, faux Western button shirts, boot-cut jeans, skinny jeans, torn jeans, slacks, khakis, and cords, none of it quite right for the too-talented-to-care nonchalance he imagines is appropriate for his first-ever Hollywood pitch meeting.
      Isn’t that such an odd paragraph (the copious hyphenated words notwithstanding)? It’s so cinematic; I can just picture it as a screenplay: “Pan in on young man and pile of clothes, including …” Most of the book is written like this. I don’t know if the author intended to mimic screenplay writing, but whether he did or not, it’s irritating to read. It seems remarkably amateur, like “This is Shane. Shane looks like this. Shane does this.” Because of this style, the characters do not seem like real people but rather characters in an epic.

      The plot also mirrors that of a movie. As a casual admirer of the occasional film, this technique is both good and bad. Movies uplift us, and this book, especially at the climax where all the characters step out of their individual vignettes to become an ensemble, made my emotions soar. But movies are also false. Movies focus more on theatrics than reality, and frustratingly, I noticed that in Beautiful Ruins as well. Walter asserts that we’re all “beautiful ruins,” messes with wonderful screwed-up lives, but this message does not align with the book’s structure. The whole book is heightened with drama. It’s a film in literature form, happy ending included.

      Mostly, though, I disliked Walter’s faux-profundity, though by the number of kindle highlighters, it appears that most people found him truly profound. To me, everything in this book was SO obvious. I wanted to scream at the author to get some original ideas. Nothing in this book was something I hadn’t seen before or thought of myself. Exhibit A: it was as if I was a character in a movie and the real action was about to start at any minute. But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start.
      This quotation had 335 kindle highlights when I read it. I must ask: WHY? It’s such a cliché! The book is essentially a bunch of semi-interesting, unoriginal ideas packaged into pretty quotations. All I could think as I read was: does this author have nothing new to say? Does he only write in clichés because he lacks any original ideas of his own?

      I enjoyed parts of this book—the cool blend of fact and fiction, the romantic backdrop of the film set of Cleopatra, the real-life characters Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. For the most part, however, it made me mad. Life is NOT a movie and we are NOT all “beautiful ruins.” This pure, unfiltered melodramatic sap, spiked with artificial depth.

      Also, this is a legitimate quotation from the book, coming right in the middle of describing an elderly man’s humdrum morning routine. When I read it, I highlighted it and annotated “wtf??? is this a joke?” I still have no idea. Or wait…is that the pill he took an hour ago? Ah yes, there it is, kicking in right on schedule: beneath the script, decrepit nerve terminals and endothelial cells release nitric oxide into the corpus cavernosum, which stimulates the synthesis of cyclic GMP, stiffening the well-used smooth muscle cells and flooding the old spongy tissue with blood.

      My guess is the author is showing off.
    • 1/5
      The scenarios in Italy were lovely.Did not care for the Hollywood scenes. gave up.
    • 3/5
      Pasquale lives in the small coastal town of Porto Vergogna. His family has lived there for generations and although Pasquale enjoys his life he wants more and is working on turning his family home into a hotel. One day, while contemplating his future tennis court he sees a young woman step off a fishing boat and start up the steps to the hotel. Certain she has come to the wrong hotel and wants to continue on down the coast to the larger hotels, he greets her and she assures him that she is indeed in the right place. She is meeting someone here. Dee Moray is an actress working on Cleopatra and she is ill. That’s all Pasquale knows about this beautiful stranger. He accepts that because after all, everyone has secrets. Fast forward 50 years to present day Hollywood, and Pasquale has finally come to find out what happened to Dee Moray oh so long ago. This is where the real story of that fateful summer begins.

      The book flips back and forth between 1962 Italy and present day Hollywood. Combining what several different characters know about the events that summer gives the reader the whole story … complete with some behind the scenes looks at the filming of Cleopatra and cameo appearances by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. That’s the main story, but there is a large cast of characters on the fringes of the story (almost too large) and they all tell their stories as well (almost too many stories). Near the end of the book we learn how they are all interconnected, but it is a bit a long haul getting there. Not a bad read, but I have to admit to putting it down a few times in favour of something else and then going back to it as the mood struck.
    • 5/5
      I absolutely loved this book. I listened to the audiobook version, which was narrated by Edoardo Ballerini. Ballerini does an incredible job with the voices and accents. His reading is perfect.The novel is wonderful. I laughed out loud often but also couldn't help my eyes leaking at times, too, not only at sad parts but just because of Jess Walter's portrayal of life, of so many different kinds of love, of hopes and dreams, some dreams dashed, some fulfilled, some contentedly abandoned. All the characters are great, and I love that Walter lets us know, in the final chapter, what is going on with everyone, even the seemingly minor characters. This is probably the best novel I've listened to in years. I recommend it highly, especially the audiobook.
    • 4/5
      I found the first two chapters to be a bit slow, but the book seemed to flow after the third chapter. Overall this was a pretty good read. (The only reason I didn't give it 4 stars was because of those first two chapters.)
    • 5/5
      When I read something like "A literary miracle" on the front cover of a book, I'm both intrigued and wary. Like, what does that even mean? Literary miracle. Well, after having read Beautiful Ruins, I understand.It seems something of a miracle that the Jess Walter was able to create such depth in his stories and his characters in a single book and even in single chapters. The book starts in a tiny village in Italy in 1962, from the perspective of a young hotelier who inherited the hotel when his father passed away. Pasquale, the young hotelier, is excited when his friend Orenzio brings a beautiful young American actress, Dee Moray, to his hotel, for whom Pasquale quickly falls. It was well written and believable.However, after reading the chapter, I was worried that I was not going to really enjoy this one because I was not really in the mood to read another foreign literary masterpiece that is dry and boring and too dense to really care. Not that the first chapter was those things -- I was just concerned that it was going to be given the high praise and where the book started.After another day or two, I picked up the book again and started reading the second chapter. The second chapter is in Hollywood, "recently" (say, around 2010), from the perspective of a young girl (late-20s) who is disillusioned about life, hollywood, and her future. It was fresh and modern and believable. It was not dry, boring, or too dense to really care. Claire is trying to find herself in Hollywood, after landing her dream job as assistnat to the legendary but somewhat washed up Michael Deane, and after landing her dream boyfriend - the gorgeous but stripper-obsessed idiot in her bed, she's realized that the glitter and the glamour are not all they're cracked up to be. With a new job prospect from a small new museum, Clair is considering whether it's time to throw in the towel on film production and cut her losses. When the new museum happens to be primarily funded by the church of scientology, it gives Clair just enough pause to give herself an ultimatum: Either she finds the one film she's been dreaming she would make on Wild Pitch Friday (where the pitches are unlikely to be for glorious masterpieces), or she quits both her job and her boyfriend and takes up the job building the new museum.And then I lost track of the chapters and time as I tore through the rest of the book.The various chapters are told interchangeably from the perspectives of Claire, Pasquale, Michael Deane (even through the memoir his agent told him they could never publish, but which Deane gives to Claire to read), Dee Moray and her son Pat Bender. Each perspective is believable -- the view from a 1962 Italian Pasquale's eyes is just as convincing as the view from a 2010-ish Hollywood Claire's eyes, is just as convincing as the memoir written from Michael Deane explaining the whole "mess." Walter even incorporates famous people and movies -- Liz Taylor and Richard Burton in Cleopatria -- to add to the realism of the tale, without ever crossing lines into the impossibility (i.e., he did not change any known facts, he just added in details into the pockets and unknowns that could be... who knows... feasible). The perspectives are all over the place, the times are all over the place, the stories are all over the place, -- front to back and back to front, and yet it is a cohesive, believable, perfectly timed story. A miracle. Even more.... he managed to actually tie together all of the characters from the 1940s to 2010, from all over the world, without it being "too convenient." I was so impressed with Walter. It felt like just a series of life events that ultimately brought all of the characters together within one story. But it did not feel forced or contrived. It just felt... natural. Like yeah, that's what happened.And then you find yourself nearing the end of the book. But, oh no, there are too many strings to tie up!! He's going to leave me hanging, I just know it.... ahhh, i hope he at least wraps up ____, and ____. And ___. But how can he! Too few pages.... You keep reading.And he does it. and it feels a little bit like a miracle. Not everything is neat and bowtied, but it's all done just enough to leave the reader at peace. With all of the stories, and all of the different lines, and all of the different characters, resolved just enough to close the book and go to sleep. All is well.A literary miracle. Now I understand...(this and other reviews at AllBookReviewer.blogspot.com)
    • 4/5
      “Beautiful Ruins” is somewhat of a chick-lit… except much more complex and a very pleasant surprise as a result. In this tale that melts the past with the present, the friendship and affections of Pasquale Tursi, the young reluctant owner of a decrepit pensione, and Dee Moray (aka Debra Bender), an up and coming new Hollywood actress, in 1962 fictional Porto Vergogna (a Cinque-Terre-wannabe itty-bitty town) morph itself to present-day Hollywood with Claire Silver, assistant to the arrogant Michael Deane. Add a host of characters, including Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, the movie ‘Cleopatra’, and even ‘The Donner Party’, the story unfolds itself like a blooming onion – a bit fried (somewhat exaggerated, somewhat preposterous), calories-laden (inflated content), and yet tasty nonetheless (plausible, fun read). Using writing vehicles of fictional text, letters, a movie pitch, a memoir, and a play, this potentially convoluted story travels through two timelines, multiple families, and multiple locations, especially the beautiful Cinque Terre. And I read it like theater popcorn complete with a Slurpee. Despite some weightiness, I give it major bonus points for the closure that it provided all-around. Each character was addressed satisfactorily, those of the past and those of the present. I smiled. It’s not easy to recommend this one as it doesn’t readily fit into a category. Those seeking a simple read will find this dreadful to follow; those seeking a worthy read will find the inclusion of ‘Cleopatra’ and the Donner Party to be ridiculous. For me, it was a wonderful and entertaining vacation read.Just one quote:From Pasquale’ mom to his younger self – on happiness:“’Sometimes,’ she said, ‘what we want to do and what we must do are not the same.’ She put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Pasquo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.’”
    • 4/5
      like jigsaw pieces scattered on a table, the book is a series of vignettes which come together and make sense only as a whole. I suspect one's patience with this book will depend on one's willingness to put the pieces together and then accept the combined beauty and mundanity of the end portrait. I truly enjoyed this but it doesn't quite have the weight to warrant 4 stars for me.