After reading People of the Book, I’ve been looking for more fiction that features books and bookmaking. My friend Sharon suggested Robert Hellenga’s 1995 book The Sixteen Pleasures, about a 29 year old midwestern American, Margot, who is trained as a book conservator and goes to Florence in 1966 when the Arno flooded and destroyed or damaged millions of books and other artwork. Ostensibly she goes to Italy to help repair and protect the books, but she’s really in search of adventure and the memory of living in Florence as a teenager. She ends up staying at an abbey of cloistered nuns and one day a nun comes upon a pornographic volume bound with a prayer book that has been damaged by the flood. It turns out to be the only copy of long lost erotic sonnets, accompanied by rather anatomically explicit engravings. The abbess asks Margot to take care of the book and sell it, to help the abbey (but to be sure the Church doesn’t find out about it). So Margot rebinds the folios and repairs the spine and covers and goes about trying to sell the book. In the meantime, there’s lots of fine detail about the restoration as well as wonderful passages about art and the life of Florence. Plus Margot finds lots of romance and adventure.
The book was a good read. And I quickly discovered that Hellenga recently wrote another book about Margot, The Italian Lover — I always want to know what happens to the characters in the books I’ve enjoyed. “The Italian Lover” takes place in 1990, Margot is now 53 and still living in Italy, still restoring books. The conceit in the new novel is that Margot wrote a book called “The Sixteen Pleasures” about her life and it is to be made into a film. While Margot is still (mostly) front and center, and there’s a bit of book restoration, there are many more characters in the new novel and a lot of plot about making movies. Worse are the annoying product placements (not just an espresso maker, an Alessi espresso maker). Oh well, I did enjoy finding out more about Margot’s life.