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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780385314695
ISBN number: 0385314698
Label: Delta
Manufacturer: Delta
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 384
Printing Date: May 01, 1995
Publishing house: Delta
Release Date: May 01, 1995
Sale Popularity Level: 129782
Studio: Delta
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Chapter One
Where I Want to Be
I was twenty-nine years old when the Arno flooded its banks on Saturday 4 November 1966. According to the Sunday New York Times the damage wasn't extensive, but by Tuesday it was clear that Florence was a disaster. Twenty feet of water in the cloisters of Santa Croce, the Cimabue crucifix ruined beyond hope of restoration, panels ripped from the Baptistry doors, the basement of the Biblioteca Nazionale completely underwater, hundreds of thousands of volumes waterlogged, the Archivio di Stato in total disarray. On Tuesday I decided to go to Italy, to offer my services as a humble book conservator, to help in any way I could, to save whatever could be saved, including myself.
The decision wasn't a popular one at home. Papa was having money troubles of his own and didn't want to pay for a ticket. And my boss at the Newberry Library didn't understand either. He already had his ticket, paid for by the library, and needed me to mind the store. There wasn't any point in both of us going, was there?
'The why don't I go and you can mind the store?'
'Because, because, because . . .'
'Yes?'
Because it just didn't make sense. He couldn't see his way clear to granting me a leave of absence, not even a leave of absence without pay. He even suggested that the library might have to replace me, in which case . . .
But I decided to go anyway. I had enough money in my savings account for a ticket on Icelandic, and I figured I could live on the cheap once I got there. Besides, I wanted to break the mold in which my life was hardening, and I thought this might be a way to do it. Going to Florence was better than waiting around with nothing coming up.
My English teacher at Kenwood High used to say that we're like onions: you can peel off one layer after another and never get to a center, an inner core. You just run out of layers. But I think I'm like a peach or an apricot or a nectarine. There's a pit at the center. I can crack my teeth on it, or I can suck on it like a piece of candy; but it won't crumble, and it won't dissolve. The pit is an image of myself when I was nineteen. I'm in Sardegna, and I'm standing high up on a large rock–a cliff, actually–and I don't have any clothes on, and everyone is looking at me, telling me to come down, not to jump, it's too high.
It's my second time in Italy. I spent a year here with Mama when I was fifteen, and then I came back by myself, after finishing high school at home, to do the last year of the liceo with my former classmates. Now we're celebrating the end of our examinations–Silvia (who spent a year with us in Chicago), Claudia, Rossella, Giulio, Fabio, Alessandro. Names like flowers, or bells. And me, Margot Harrington. More friends are coming later. Silvia's parents (my host family) have a summer house just outside Terranova, but we're camping on the beach, five kilometers down the coast. The coast is safe, they say, though there are bandits in the centro. Wow!
It's my birthday–August first–and we've had a supper of bluefish and squid that we caught with a net. The squid taste like rubber bands, the heavy kind that I used to chew on in grade school and that boys sometimes used to snap our bottoms with in junior high. Life is sharp and snappy, too, full of promise, like the sting of those rubber bands: I've passed my examinations with distinction; I'm going to Harvard in the fall (well, to Radcliffe); I've got an Italian boyfriend named Fabio Fabbriani; and I've just been skinny-dipping in the stinging cold salt sea.
The others have put their clothes on now–I can see them below me, sitting around the remains of the fire in shorts and halter tops and shirts with the sleeves rolled up two turns, talking, glancing up nervously–but I want to savor the taste/thrill of my own nakedness a little longer, unembarrassed in the dwindling light. It's the scariest thing I've ever done, except coming to Italy in the very first place.
Fabio sits with his back toward me while he smokes a cigarette, pretending to be angry because I won't come down, but when I close my eyes and will him to turn, he puts his cigarette out in the sand and turns. Just at that moment I jump, sucking in my breath for a scream but then holding it, in case I need it latter, which I do. I hit the Tyrrhenian Sea feet first, generating little waves that will, in theory, soon be lapping the beaches along the entire western coast of Italy–Sicily and North Africa, too. The Tyrrhenian Sea responds by closing over me and it's pitch, not like the pool in Chicago where I learned to swim, but deep and dark and dangerous and deadly.
The air in my lungs–the scream and I saved for just such an occasion–carries me up to the surface, and I strike out for the cove, meeting Fabio before I'm halfway there, wondering if like me he's naked under the water and not knowing for sure till we're walking waist deep and he takes me by the shoulders and kisses me and I can feel something bobbing against my legs like a floating cork. We haven't made love yet, but it's won't be long now. O dio mio. The waiting is so lovely. He squeezes my buns and I squeeze his, surprised, and then we splash in to the beach and put on our clothes.
What I didn't know at the time was that my mother had become seriously ill. Instead of spending the rest of the summer in Sardegna, I had to go back to Chicago, and then, after that, nothing happened. I mean none of the things I'd expected to happen happened. Instead of making love with Fabio Fabbriani on the verge of the Tyrrhenian Sea, I got laid on a vinyl sofa in the back room of the SNCC headquarters on Forty-seventh Street. Instead of going to Harvard, I went to Edgar Lee Masters College, where Mama had taught art history for twenty years. Instead of going to graduate school I spent two years at the Institute for Paper Technology on Green Bay Avenue; instead of becoming a research chemist I apprenticed myself to a book conservator in Hyde Park and then took a position in the conservation department of the Newberry Library. Instead of getting married and having a daughter of my own, I lived at home and looked after Mama, who was dying of lung cancer. A year went by, two years, three years, four. Mama died; Papa lost most of his money. My sister Meg got married and moved away; my sister Molly went to California with her boyfriend and then to Ann Arbor. The sixties were churning around me, and I couldn't seem to get a footing. I tried to plunge in, to get wet, to catch hold, to find a place in one of the boats tossing and turning on the white-water rapids: the sit-ins, the rock concerts, the freedom rides, SNCC, CORE, SDS, the Civil Rights Act, the Great Society. I spent a lot of time holding hands and singing 'We shall overcome,' I spent a lot of time buying coffee and doughnuts and rolling joints, and I spent some time on my back, too–the only position for a woman in the Movement.
I'd had no sleep on the plane; my eyes were blurry so it was hard to read; and besides, the story I was reading was as depressing as the view from the window of the train–flat, gray, poor, dreary, actively ugly rather than passively uninteresting. And I kept thinking about Papa and his money troubles and his lawsuits, and about the embroidered seventeenth-century prayer books on my work table at the Newberry that needed to be disbound, washed, mended, and resewn before Christmas for an exhibit sponsored by the Caxton Club.
So I was under a certain amount of pressure. I was looking for a sign, the way some religious people look for signs, something to let them know they're on the right track. Or on the wrong track, in which case they can turn back. I didn't know what I was looking for, but I was trying to pay attention, to notice everything–the faces of the two American women sitting opposite me in the compartment, scribbling furiously in their notebooks; the Neapolitan accent of the Italian conductor; the depressing French farmhouses, gray boxes of stucco or cinder block, I couldn't make out which.
That's what I was doing–paying attention–when the train pulled into the station at Metz and I saw the Saint-Cyr cadet on the platform, bright as the Archangel Gabriel bringing the good news to the Virgin Mary.
I'd better explain. Papa did all the cooking in our family. He started when Mama went to Italy one summer when I was nine–it was right after the war–to look at the pictures, to see for herself what she'd only seen in the Harvard University Prints series and on old three-by-four-inch tinted slides that she used to project on the dining room wall; and when she came back he kept on doing it. My sisters and I did the dishes and Papa took care of everything else, day in and day out, and whether it was Italian or French or Chinese or Malaysian, it was always wonderful, it was always special. Penne alla puttanesca, an arista tied with sprigs of rosemary, paper-thin strips of beef marinated in hoisin sauce and Szechwan peppercorns, whole fresh salmon poached in white wine and finished with a mustard sauce, chicken thighs simmered in soy sauce and lime juice, curries so fiery that at their very first bite unwary guests would clutch their throats and cry out for water, which didn't help a bit. Those were our favorites, the standards against which we measured other dishes; but our very favorite treat of all was the dessert Papa made on our birthdays, instead of cake, which was supposed to look like the hats worn by cadets at Saint-Cyr, the French military academy. We'd never been to Saint-Cyr, of course, but we would have recognized a cadet anywhere in the world, if he'd been wearing his hat.
That's why I was so startled when I looked out the window of the Luxembourg-Venise Express and saw my cadet standing there on the platform–the young man Papa had teased me about, the Prince Charming who had never mat...
Amazon.com Review:
In 1966, 29-year-old Margot Harrington heads off to Florence, intent on doing her bit to protect its precious books from the great floods--and equally intent on adventure. Serendipity, in the shape of the man she'll fall in love with, leads her to an abbey run by the most knowing of abbesses and work on its library begins. One day a nun comes upon a shockingly pornographic volume, bound with a prayer book. It turns out to be Aretino's lost erotic sonnets, accompanied by some rather anatomical engravings. Since the pope had ordered all copies of the Sixteen Pleasures burned, it could be worth a fortune and keep the convent autonomous. The abbess asks Margot to take care of the book and check into its worth: 'We have to be cunning as serpents and innocent as doves,' she warns.
Soon our heroine finds her identity increasingly 'tangled up' with the volume and with Dottor Postiglione, a man with an instinct for happiness--but also one for self-preservation. Margot enjoys the secrecy and the craft (the chapters in which she rebinds the folios are among the book's finest). Much of the book's pleasure stems from Robert Hellenga's easy knowledge, which extends to Italian complexities. Where else would you learn that, in cases of impotence, legal depositions are insufficient: 'Modern couples often take the precaution of sending postcards to each other from the time of their engagement, leaving the message space blank so that it can be filled in later if the couple wishes to establish grounds for an annulment.' Luckily, however, there are also shops that sell old postcards, 'along with the appropriate writing instruments and inks.'
Though The Sixteen Pleasures is initially in the tradition of American innocent goes abroad to encounter European experience, Hellenga's depth (and lightness) of characterization and description lift it high above its genre. And what better book than one about loving and loving books?
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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As The Sixteen Pleasures opens, Margot Harrington is sharing a train compartment with a pair of American divorcees. She's headed for Italy to assist in a massive restoration effort; they've embarked on a European vacation to gather "material" in support of their literary aspirations. We're treated to a glimpse of their creative process in action:
- "Did you get the man with the pipe?"
- "Got him."
- "The sheep?"
- "What sheep? I didn't see any sheep."
- "Hah! How about the announcement on the PA system? Did you get that?"
- "Pardonnay something-or-other, that's all I got. How about you?"
The conversation then shifts to reflect on their workshop instructor's sexual appetite (they've both appeared on the menu), and eventually they share the prosaic yet deeply personal childhood memories around which they hope to craft meaningful stories. We're invited to smile condescendingly at the bourgeois naïveté that leads them to mistake accuracy for truth, knowing that their earnest attention to detail will not by itself imbue the mundane with a sense of artistic profundity.
Unfortunately, the author doesn't seem to have taken his own object lesson to heart. The Sixteen Pleasures is a light coming-of-age of story in which the 29-year old narrator rediscovers and redefines herself through her adventures abroad. It's Fear of Flying, but filtered through the soft-focus lens of Eat, Pray, Love. Interesting and detailed nuggets of information pop up almost every other page: methods of manual book-binding, the chemistry of 15th century frescoes, and foibles of marital politics in modern Italy are all stitched together to provide a lovely backdrop for the narrator's journey of self-discovery.
As pleasant as this backdrop is, there's very little to care about in the foreground. Margot falls in love, suffers heartbreak, heals, achieves a professional sucess and makes peace with her past... none of which is particularly dramatic. Margot is borne through these events by a gentle, twisting current of narrative. We bob along with her, observing everything that happens with an idle curiosity, but never any sense of tension or concern. In the end, the ride is unremarkable.
If Margot were real, it's easy to see how this story would be a compelling one, for her - it's her life, after all. But the author's challenge is to craft a story that feels both true and immediately meaningful for us. Like the ladies on the train, Hellenga succeeds in faithfully imparting what happens without convincing us that we should really concern ourselves with why it happens at all.
Rated by buyers 
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It had been a while since I read this, but am clearing my shelves for new books. I remeber liking it a great deal- but of course Florence is one of my favorite places on earth, and a wonderful place to be in love. In another copy of this that I had on my shelf, a previous reader had marked this passage (typos are my own;-))
"Which of us doesn't have a similar ghostly double wandering around somewhere out there in the big wide world? A self from whom we parted company long ago, at some unlikely crossroads? But do we ever encounter these ghostly selves? Do our worlds ever intersect? I can't believe it. The one is too impermeable, the other too fine, too subtle."
I also may never hear the phrase "Non vale la pena" ( It's not worth the trouble")again without chuckling and thinking of Margot's " Non vale il pene".
Rated by buyers 
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I just finished The Sixteen Pleasures, and for the most part I liked it. It moved quickly, gave beautiful descriptions of Italy and the art, and was generally an easy read. There are a few reasons why I won't give it more than three stars:
1) I found the character of the Heroin, Margot, to be extremely annoying. She was arrogant, lamenting the fact that she never went to Harvard as she should have. She was also cold emotionally. I just never really liked her and for that reason I couldn't relate to her.
2) The above complaint is due to the fact that the author is obviously a man writing a woman's character. I do agree with other posters that he presents a rather sexist view of a "progressive" woman.
3) What's with the point of view constantly changing?!?! First it's from Margot's perspective, then Sandro's, then a third person narrative. It really annoyed me.
Overall, I would still recommend this book. As someone who has both lived in Italy and studies art professionally, I can attest to the high quality of the author's descriptions of both. It's a good vacation/lazy weekend book.
Rated by buyers 
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I tried, really I tried! I trusted that a National best seller would provide an interesting distraction, but after pushing myself through the very first 75 pages, I just gave up! It could have amazing redeeming qualities, but I just couldn't engage in the writers style.
Rated by buyers -
A fine read with well-drawn characters, touches of accademia and eroticism--all set in one of the world's more charming cities.
Poignant and well written. I appreciated learning a bit, even fictionalized, about the 1966 flood of the Arno River, which destroyed many books and works of art.
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