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The Sixteen Pleasures

Audiobook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks

I was twenty-nine years old when the Arno flooded its banks on Friday, 4 November 1966. On Tuesday I decided to go to Italy, to offer my services as a humble book conservator, to save whatever could be saved, including myself.

The Italians called them "Mud Angels," the young foreigners who came to Florence in 1966 to save the city's treasured art from the Arno's flooded banks. American volunteer Margot Harrington was one of them, finding her niche in the waterlogged library of a Carmelite convent. Within its walls she discovered a priceless Renaissance masterwork: a sensuous volume of sixteen erotic poems and drawings.

Inspired to sample each of the ineffable sixteen pleasures, Margot embarks on the intrigue of a lifetime with a forbidden lover and the contraband volume—a sensual, life-altering journey of loss and rebirth in this exquisite novel of spiritual longing and earthly desire.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 1, 1995
      A young American book conservator's discovery, while in Florence, of a volume of 16 sensual drawings with equally erotic sonnets leads her to a romantic encounter.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Robert Hellenga's lovely story of a young book conservator's self-exploration in Italy during the late 1960s after the Arno River has flooded and damaged the most telling works of art unfolds through Hillary Huber's narration. Huber begins with a precise and steady rhythm that relaxes and even becomes playful when the young woman reaches Italy and meets numerous characters on this European excursion. Huber gives us flavorful voices of different ages that we must distinguish through both the text and her stylistic shift in accents, volume, and tone. She mixes the English and Italian language fluidly, at times offering humor while at other times returning to the steady pleasantries of the main character's native tongue. T.E.C. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 2, 1994
      Graceful, assured prose, a wry but empathetic view of the human character and an authoritative command of fascinating background detail are among the distinguishing features of this deeply satisfying first novel. Set in Florence after the terrible Arno flood of 1966, it is told partially by narrator Margot Harrington, a 29-year-old American book conservator who has come to Italy as one of the ``mud angels'' who volunteer in the wake of the disaster. Margot's life has been a series of bright promises deflected to dead ends, and she hopes Florence will provide a key to her future. Art restoration expert Dottor Alessandro Postiglione--debonair, middle-aged and married--suggests that Margot lodge at a Carmelite convent whose abbess is his cousin. When the nuns discover a priceless (and proscribed) Renaissance manuscript of 16 erotic poems and drawings, the abbess asks Margot to sell it, secretly, so that the convent will have the funds to resist the overbearing bishop's efforts to seize its treasured library. Many strands wind through the rest of the narrative: details about techniques of book and art restoration, observations of convent life refracted through Margot's Protestant sensibilities and such arcane (and humorous) information as the methods by which a canonical court decides whether a man is truly impotentia coeundi (and thus entitled to an annulment). Meanwhile, Margot's love affair with Sandro is described in sensuous detail. It is remarkable that Hellenga, a recipient of a PEN fiction award for his short stories, can at this point in his career produce such a witty, sophisticated and wise novel, its erotic passages underscored by a poignant, even melancholic undercurrent of change and loss and flashes of existential meaning about the conflicting demands of spirit and flesh. 25,000 first printing; author tour.

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