The Sixteen Pleasures

I found this book on an NPR website's Guilty Pleasures.  It included a group of books that evoked a different time and place for their readers.  I expected the time period of The Sixteen Pleasures (#16) to be Renaissance Florence, but instead, it was about the Florence of the 1960s, just after the flood that devastated so much of the artwork there.  The protaganist of The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga is an Italian-American book conservator from Chicago who spent a couple of her high school years in Florence with her art professor mother.  She longs to do something for her adopted city and thinks her skills could be used, so off she sets without a plan and without much money.  She does eventually get an assignment at a convent library and in the course of the restoration the nuns uncover a one-of-a-kind pornographic book of engravings and sonnets concealed in a prayer book - the long-lost and banned Sixteen Pleasures.  How to sell it for the benefit of the convent without the bishop's knowledge drives the rest of the tale. 

I almost gave up on this book not very far into it.  To be honest, I was afraid the male author would go overboard with his descriptions of the workings of the female mind and emotions in the opening scenes set on the train, but he seems to have gotten that out of his system.  The rest of the book was convincingly evocative of what life must have been like in a Florence of the 60s overrun with international do-gooders. 

I learned more about how a book is put together in this novel than in the equally captivating People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, also about book conservation.  There are also interesting glimpses of life in an enclosed convent, Italian love and marriage, and the Church's dominance of both religious and marital life, and the mysterious world of rare book dealers and auctions.  There was definitely enough here to make the perservance worthwhile.