Novel about conservator

The New Yorker (8/1/94) makes note of a novel by Robert Hellenga called
"The Sixteen Pleasures."  It concerns a twenty-nine year old book
conservator who has come to Florence in 1966 to "save whatever could be
saved, including myself."  According to the review, she is "taken up and
subsequently exploited by a Harvard big shot on the flood scene, but she
moves on, landing in a cloistered convent.  There she is in the dodgy
position of trying to save the convent's invaluable library, not only
physically but financially, through the potentially illegal sale of a
volume of sixteenth-century pornographic pictures and sonnets."  The
reviewer found the book sharply suspenseful and "modest, resourceful,
and without malice," just like the conservator.

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 8:11
                  Distributed: Monday, August 1, 1994
                        Message Id: cdl-8-11-003
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