I wanted to love this novel, which is set in 1966-1967 and centers on a twenty-nine-year-old book conservator who goes to Florence to restore damaged books after the Arno floods, but either it’s just not the book for me or I wasn’t in the right mood.
Maybe my problem is mostly structural: after starting really engagingly, with a wonderful first few chapters narrated by Margot Harrington, the aforementioned book conservator, the book switches to third-person narrative to introduce Sandro Postiglione, the fifty-two-year-old art preservationist with whom Margot ends up embarking on an affair. The book then carries on switching back and forth between first-person and third-person narration, and while I think that’s sometimes a good narrative strategy, it felt clunky here.
I do mostly like Margot as a character: she’s smart but adrift: she’d been a promising student and had planned to go to Harvard, but ended up staying in Chicago because her mother was dying of lung cancer, and hasn’t really figured out who she is or what she’s doing because she’s too haunted by her “ghostly double,” the imagined self she might have been, with the imagined life she might have had. She’s good at what she does, though, and is engaged in her work in Florence, trying to save the library of a convent from water damage. When the nuns find a 16th-century book of erotic sonnets and engravings, she throws herself into restoring it and figuring out how she can sell it and give the proceeds back to the convent without the bishop finding out (because he’ll want the money from the book’s sale to go to the diocese generally, rather than to the convent).
The back cover, which talks about Margot being “inspired to sample each of the ineffable sixteen pleasures,” sells this book as much sexier than it is: Margot does have a sexual awakening (she notes that before she started seeing Sandro, she’d never really experienced lust), but there is more about bookbinding and the restoration of frescoes and how the Church courts deal with annulments than there is about those sixteen pleasures. There are some lovely descriptive passages about Italy, though, like this list of things that Margot and Sandro hear from their hotel room when they go to Rome:
buzz of Vespas, shifting of gears, opening and closing of heavy doors, steady plash of fountain, deep masculine laughter, dreamy voices of women who’ve been drinking wine and smoking cigarettes, rumble of wheels on the paving stones, voices of porters who arrive at three o’clock to assemble the stalls: fruit, vegetables, cheese, meat, flowers, clothes, material, shoes, leather goods, vendors in full cry—it’s morning. (234-235)
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