Armchair Audies Category Report: Solo Narration - Male

The Audies are this week! You know what that means, dear readers: much Armchair Audies posting about them now, but then I'll shush a bit for a year. (Ha. I will not.)

Here's the slate of nominees for Solo Narration - Male:

BEING THERE Jerzy Kosinski Read by Dustin Hoffman (Audible, Inc.) Read the review
THE ABSOLUTIST John Boyne Read by Michael Maloney (Tantor Media) Read the review
BEAUTIFUL RUINS Jess Walter Read by Edoardo Ballerini (Harper Audio) Read the review
THE END OF THE AFFAIR Graham Greene Read by Colin Firth (Audible, Inc.) Read the review
THE TAO OF POOH Benjamin Hoff Read by Simon Vance (Tantor Media) Read the review

Now, I've already commented on each of these separately (Being There, The Absolutist, Beautiful Ruins, The End of the Affair, The Tao of Pooh), so I won't go too much into it. But I'll say this: we're looking here for "distinction in audiobooks" here. And for me, one of those parameters is, do I think this is more compelling than the text alone would be? Another: does the narrator do so good a job that I start looking for more narration by him (or her, but that's n/a in this category) and pick up audiobooks I wouldn't necessarily have looked at otherwise?

Beautiful Ruins succeeds magnificently on both scores. I actually started this book on paper, and didn't

get very into it before the library due date, so I returned it. But it was part of The Rooster competition, so I went back to it in audio, and oh, baby. It's grand. Ballerini brings such life to Walter's text (which I should have given a fairer chance, as it's quite magnificent and you should read or listen to it if you haven't already.) So Ballerini is my pick for the win, and it will be a very well-deserved one. (It's also up for Audiobook of the Year, and I'm expecting it to take that, too.)

2nd place: Maloney reading The Absolutist. It's a great book, very well read.

Then Firth reading The End of the Affair, then Hoffman reading Being There, and finally - and I know this is a shocking thing, but the book: blah and Piglet: gah - Vance reading The Tao of Pooh.

(Sorry, Simon Vance! You're still my #1 audio crush! Read different things and I'm there.)

Beautiful Ruins

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
(Harper, 2012)
Format: audio download via Audible (narrated by Edoardo Ballerini for Harper Audio)

From Goodreads: "The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying.

And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot--searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.

What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Walter introduces us to the tangled lives of a dozen unforgettable characters."


I abandoned this novel after a couple of pages and only went back to it because it's on the 2013 Tournament of Books list. Since a couple of people had mentioned the quality of the audio, I used one of my Audible credits for it, and gave it another try. Boy am I glad I did. Let that be a lesson to me about judging too soon. 

So, there's the innkeeper Pasquele, who's the driving force, the pure-hearted guy with a couple of not-so-pure moments in his past. His encounter with the actress Dee, though only a couple of days in their lives, affects them both profoundly for decades to come. And not just them - there are webs radiating out across continents, in their gentle but insistent ways. There are multiple time frames and story lines here, and they play together nicely. I kept wishing the different characters could impart their lessons to each other, even if they were no where near each other in time or space, which was an interesting game to play as I read. (Listened. Whatever you want to call it.) It all pulled together into a rich, fun, smart tale that touched on desire, identity, heritage, memory, ambition, beauty, and loss. Just lovely.

Ballerini is a new-to-me narrator, and I enjoyed him ever so much. The Italian accents were charming, and his handling of many different Hollywood types (producer, writer, actors) felt spot-on. I do think that if I'd given the print version another chance, I'd have devoured Walter's novel for its own sake, but this is one of those narrations that truly enhances the experience of the book.