Customer Reviews

The Italian Lover

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Cleverly written as a sequel, yet a fine stand-alone novel, THE ITALIAN LOVER covers the making of a movie about THE SIXTEEN PLEASURES, in which Robert Hellenga first introduced us to Margot Harrington. Back then, she was a young American woman who traveled to Florence after the devastating flood of 1966, eager to do anything she could to help save some of the world's irreplaceable treasures. In the midst of a crisis in the art world, faced with the almost certain loss of innumerable ancient masterpieces, Margot's skills were not only desperately needed but welcomed. While working to restore paintings and documents, she made a stunning discovery.

As THE ITALIAN LOVER opens, Margot has set up a studio overlooking the Arno River. More than two decades have passed since she first arrived in Florence. She is quite content with her work and her life in general. But a guy named Woody is about to change that.

Brought together by a restlessness neither of them knew they had --- and an incident with a dog --- Woody and Margot grow from acquaintances to friends to lovers. Woody has been homesick lately, and, while Margot certainly eases his longing for the States, he is feeling the tug of the small town he left long ago. For Margot, it is an especially thrilling time. Not only is she involved with a man she enjoys more than any she has met in years, a well-known producer, Esther Klein, has purchased the movie rights to Margot's book. Excited and more than a little bit flattered, Margot launches herself into the project wholeheartedly, as she does with every endeavor in her life. She and Woody work together to create a screenplay, envisioning a variety of stars in the leading roles and picturing the scenes as Margot lived them.

But authors envision things differently from producers and directors. Esther Klein has a vision very unlike Margot's. When the entire cast and crew come to Florence, a few sparks fly --- and naturally a few sparks are ignited between the players. It is not hard to imagine how, in such a romantic city in this very beautiful part of Italy, love could happen.

When the Easter break rolls around, they must give up their hotel rooms for guests with prior reservations. The time is well spent, traveling to the countryside, the wine towns, the hill towns and the big towns, exploring and reliving experiences from another time. Each of them takes the reader along for a short but delicious escape into Italy. They eat well, drink fine wine and generally have a grand old time.

Of course, there's plenty of friction too. Husbands and wives have different agendas. New lovers learn some secrets they didn't need to know. Besides Margot's frustration with the screenplay, Margot and Woody have difficult decisions. And Woody has a huge problem with the dog's legal owner. But that's another story altogether.

THE SIXTEEN PLEASURES was such a memorable read that it seemed impossible to follow it up with much success, but Robert Hellenga has managed to bring us another great chapter in the life of Margot Harrington. And now that the movie has come out --- at least in the book --- where will he go from here?

--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers

Readers of The Sixteen Pleasures will be delighted with the return of Hellenga's intriguing cast of characters, particularly heroine Margot Harrington. A book conservationist, she first came to Italy following the great flood of 1966. And, to her great amazement she came upon a copy of a book of Renaissance erotic drawings. She also embarked upon a love affair with an Italian art conservator. This coupling, as the song goes was too hot not to cool down, and the affair ended badly but Margot survived, and now the story of her life to date will be filmed.

Producing the film is Esther Klein, once a top notch movie maker with her husband, Harry. Greener pastures beckoned Harry - not younger but greener and he dumped Esther for another woman. To add insult to injury it was a woman of Esther's age. Nonetheless, Esther is now working solo and determined to show Hollywood and the world that she could make a major film on her own. Nothing will stop her, she opines, absolutely nothing.

Margot has found a new love interest in the person of Woody, a professor from Illinois, who had come to Italy for the trial of terrorists who put a bomb in a busy train station killing many, including Woody's daughter. He's a bit at loose ends now, soon pairing with Margot to write the screenplay for her film biography.

Once the cast and crew arrives egos clash, careers as well as life hang in the balance, and lovers connect. All of this against one of the most beautiful, fascinating backdrops in the world - Florence, Italy. Hellenga treats us to vivid descriptions of gustatorial delights, art treasures, and scenic meanderings.

Highly recommended for Italophiles and arm chair travelers with one major caveat - more careful editing. Misspellings are very distracting.

- Gail Cooke

I have read each of Hellenga's previous four novels. I continue to do so (despite the slippage in each progressive work) because I appreciate his "romantic sensibility." As a male of about his age, however, I am skeptical that his female characters are "true." I have not researched the reviews of his works, but I suspect that his female characters have been criticized as male constructs. He writes of male-female relationships as males might wish them (myself included, that's why I continue to read him), but . . . does it comport with experience.

This book is worth reading, if you have read "Sixteen Pleasures" and "Fall of a Sparrow." If you have, the story line is far more engaging than I imagine it would be without the back story provided by those two novels. I don't know how I would have reacted to this book without this background. The author's going back to these earlier works can be viewed in (at least) two ways -- is it inventive and creative, or is it a consequence of creative exhaustion? Having read both, I am not sure.

My view is, however, that this is a less engaging read than either of its back stories. Read both first, then make up you own mind.

If you enjoyed The 16 Pleasures by Hellenga and are particularly interested in the flavors and history of Florence, Italy, you naturally would want to read The Italian Lover.
Well, save your money. Mr. Hellenga has compromised his writing to make big bucks. There is little tension in the book, no character whom I cared about, and the dialogue is contrived and offensive at times.
I took the book to Florence,Italy from where I just returned. What a waste of time. I had to force myself to finish the novel whose whiney characters made me want to toss the book into the garbage. I left the book in Italy rather than keep it on my bookshelf next to Hellenga's other novel.
I give this book only one star, although Amazon review says I gave it 2 stars.

It is a bittersweet experience to finish reading The Italian Lover the last of Robert Hellenga's interconnected novels, which begin with The Sixteen Pleasures featuring Margot Harrington, The Fall of the Sparrow featuring Woody Woodhull and Philosophy Made Simple featuring Margot's father, Rudy. Hellenga's themes are presented in such an understated fashion, intertwined with wonderful Italian meals, sights and blues music.

The Italian Lover departs from his usual story which involves a main character and their life crisis and becomes a Robert Altman type of story with a multitude of intertwined characters trying to find their way in the world, all connected in some way to Margot's original book The Sixteen Pleasures or Florence. Oddly this is a story about the making of The Sixteen Pleasures into a movie titled The Italian Lover.

The Italian Lover left me wanting more, more Margot, more Woody, more Miranda, more Esther, more Florence, more food, more blues, more Robert Hellenga books.

I love, love , love, the Fall of the Sparrow, and also loved the 16 pleasures. So I was so excited to find out that the two protagonists would be brought together in this book. I was very disappointed to find out that most of the book would deal with new, more shallow characters who are making a movie out of 16 pleasures. I wish Hellenga would write another book about Woody without all the junk he put in this one.

Reviewed by Irene Watson for Reader Views (8/07)


Hellenga's setting in "The Sixteen Pleasures" (1995) brings back protagonist Margot Harrington into his latest book, "The Italian Lover," with romantic intrigue and comedy.

At the center of the story is Margot, an American living in Florence, whose career encompasses restoring books. She is also an author of a memoir about her discovery of Florence and her love affair. It is the fall of 1990, and she is waiting for the arrival of a film producer interested in generating her story into film.

During her wait, Margot meets and falls in love with Woody, an American teaching literature at the American Academy. As a sideline Woody plays guitar at the Bebop Club. Together they attempt to write the script that would impress the producer.

Onto the scene comes Esther Kein, a producer, who once worked with her estranged husband producing films, Michael Gardiner, a victim of cancer, and Miranda Clark, an aspiring and distressed actress vying for the roll of Margot. As each character and subplot emerges, so does the drama of everyday life of the characters.

Hellenga sets the scenes dramatically and pulls the reader into the panorama of Italian life. I found the Italian phrases distracting because I didn't know what they meant, and spent time guessing, often losing the intended plot. At times I also felt the storyline was slow and the characters under-developed.

With all that said, I did enjoy "The Italian Lover" from the perspective of Italian culture. It brought old traditions into the modern intricacy and sophistication, realizing the differences between Italy and United States. Margot, herself, experiences of home, work, and love were not the same as she knew them in America, and conflicted in her Italian life. A good read and a book that makes you think of your own cultural differences.

Book received free of charge.

In this exquisitely written meditation on love and romance, author Robert Hellenga explores the relationship between art and life and how cinema acts as a type of looking glass so that the past is laid over the future and the future is laid over the past. Fifty-three-year-old book conservator Margot Harrington is finally going to have her memoir filmed about her life in Florence and her experiences when she'd first came to Italy after the big flood of 1966.

Central to Margo's sojourn on Florence is her discovery in the convent where she had been working of a unique copy of a book of Renaissance erotic drawings and poems called The Sixteen Pleasures by Pietro Aretino. However, the unearthing of this priceless manuscript also coincides with Margot's tempestuous love affair with an Italian art conservator, which ends in failure even as her mother finds happiness with her own Italian lover.

Meanwhile, blessed with an affable personality, the articulate historian Alan Woody Woodhull pays his guitar at the local Bebop Club while also teaching at the American Academy of Florence. Woody had come to Italy in 1987 for the trial of the terrorists who'd killed his daughter, but after living in Bologna for a couple of years, he travelled to Florence, even so, at the end of the year, he hopes to return to Illinois, St. Clair.

When Woody meets the lovely Margot, however, his plans to go home a placed on hold. Opening his heart to this enigmatic and lively woman, Woody is cemented in Margot's favour after the dramatic street rescue a dog that is being abused by its owner. Margot is lonely, afraid and homesick for Chicago but she's also attracted to Woody. The two become friends and lovers, and they both hope that the movie would validate Margo's life and her decision to say in Italy, especially when Woody offers to help her write her own version of the screenplay.

At the same time in Los Angeles, the film's producer Esther Klein is reeling after having just split with Harry, her husband of thirty years. Even though she's spent most of her most of her life hangout with budding directors and moguls, she's still feeling adift, and it isn't as if she'd never made a film before, it's just that she's never done it without Harry to direct it.

Luckily, however, Esther's savior arrives in the form of Michael Gardner. Once labeled a "middling" director by the critics, Michael is now dying of cancer and desperate to make a last successful movie even as his loving wife Beryl, struggles with the pain of his steadily encroaching illness. While Italian Comedy dell art actor Giovanni "Zanni" Cipriona is attached as the male lead, Esther is determined that a fresh new face to play Margot.

When working actress Miranda Clark reads in Variety that Esther Klein is going to make a film of Margot Harrington's The Sixteen Pleasures, she intuitively knows this is the sign she's been waiting for. After ten years in Los Angeles where no one has noticed her, even after appearing in nineteen movies, ten of which got a theatrical release, Miranda knows with all her might that this is her last chance at fame and that she just has to have this role.

The stage is now set for this diverse group of characters to gather in Florence to recreate Margo's story through the beauty of film. But things don't go according plan: Esther's plans to use her own screenplay are placed in jeopardy when Margo realizes the shooting script doesn't look anything like the draft she and Woody had written; she'd known that Esther had tweaked it and she'd braced herself for the changes, but she isn't prepared for the extent of the damage.

The shooting begins and Zanni brings out the best in Miranda just as her most honest, truest, and deepest Margot-self begins to merge with a wiser and more confident touch on life. Beryl, "a handsome woman with money and good taste," who once thought she was happy with Michael, embarks on a passionate affair that fills her life with joy and love, and her earlier feelings about her husband - her knowledge that he was middling - turns to tenderness.

Meanwhile, Woody, "standing on the threshold of life," fights to keep his beloved dog Biscotti, while also torn between the desire to stay with Margot in Florence or return home to his beloved Illinois. He certainly feels a connection to Italy as he tries to overcome the tragedy that occurred so long ago, but he continues to be haunted by the memory of his daughter Cookie, and his wife Hannah whose mental breakdown caused her to leave for a convent where she now lays dying.

Blending the otherworldly beauty of his setting with the deeper meanings behind the search for love and the desire to connect, author Robert Hellenga steeps his novel in Italian art, literature and culture, with the novel almost reading almost like a magical travelogue to this beautiful city of Florence. Of course the movie is eventually completed and the consequences of its release end up affecting all of the characters in surprising ways with Florence coming so symbolize something so much more personal to all of these people.

In the end, The Italian Lover is about how art heals the wound of individuality and how life keeps repeating and turning, indeed there is no end of new lives, renaissances and rebirths. Reverberating throughout the book is the manuscript of The Sixteen Pleasures which is important because of the way it influences the life of the plucky heroine Margot, who courageously pulls herself up from her bootstraps, the book articulating her inner-most needs, her moods and her thoughts, and her everlasting longing for her mother and the life that she had once lived. Mike Leonard November 07.

Margot's Italian love affair is about to made into a film. Hollywood. To make money. So you know what's going to happen; it's not going to be anythng like Margot's real affair, and it won't win the Academy Award, will it?
I don't know. People liked this book. Hellenga is a good writer, but you wouldn't necessarily learn that from this book. For me, nothing much happened- page after page. Nice strolls around Florence, I guess. Better just go there yourself; fabulous place and time much better spent for sure than reading this book. Would have made a very good short story perhaps.
You may be moved to profitably consider your own sense of place in relation to these characters; but I suspect you'll have better ways of doing that than reading this book. Read it in a day if you've not much else to do.