The Italian Lover
Categories: Staff Picks , Fiction
I’ve read a whole string of great new books lately. Some I won’t blog, like Richard Price’s new novel, Lush Life, since you probably already have your place staked out in line for them (do if you don’t), but here’s one you may not have heard much about: Robert Hellenga’s The Italian Lover.
It’s a fairly direct sequel to his debut novel, The Sixteen Pleasures, but you don’t have to have read that novel (I haven’t yet), nor The Fall of a Sparrow (whose protagonist shows up in a major role here, too) to appreciate it.
Margot Harrington is an American book conservator living in Florence, where she came in 1966 to restore books damaged in the great flood of the Arno. In 1975 she wrote a book about her experiences as one of the foreign “mud angels,” her discovery of a book of Renaissance erotica in the convent where she was working, and the grand love affair she had then with an Italian art conservator. Now, some fifteen years later, there is going to be a film made of her memoir.
While the movie people gather—Esther Klein, producing her first film since her divorce from her more famous producer husband; Miranda Clark, the young actor who loved Margot’s book and can’t believe she is going to play her; Michael Gardiner, the midlist director who has one more chance to make a great film before prostate cancer kills him; and his wife, Beryl, who will have to find some way to go on after his death—Margot begins a new affair with another American expat, Woody.
They all know that all of this is temporary and in the odd way of art, unreal. (Esther hasn’t broken it to Margot that she changed the ending of Margot’s memoir to play better on film.) But that doesn’t make it less important or emotional. As the filming and the various love affairs wind to a close, all of the characters recognize that their lives have been changed by these few brief months.
It’s a wonderfully involving work of literature, full of interest in both its characters and the art, philosophy, history of the country in which it takes place. Hellenga clearly loves Italy, which he wrote about in The Fall of a Sparrow, too—that’s Woody’s backstory.
