Works by
Robert Hellenga
(Writer)
[August 5, 1941 - ]

Fiction

• The Italian Lover (2007)
  An exhilarating novel of romance, art, and food in Florence, featuring the beloved Margot Harrington, who graced Robert Hellenga's The Sixteen Pleasures. Margot Harrington's memoir about her discovery in Florence of a priceless masterwork of Renaissance erotica - and the misguided love affair it inspired - is now, 25 years later, being made into a movie. Margot, with the help of her lover, Woody, writes a script that she thinks will validate her life. Of course their script is not used, but never mind - happy endings are the best endings for movies, as Margot eventually comes to see. At the former convent in Florence where The Sixteen Pleasures - now called "The Italian Lover," - is being filmed, Margot enters into a drama she never imagined, where her ideas of home, love, art, and aging collide with the imperatives of commerce and the unknowability of other cultures and other people.

• Philosophy Made Simple (2006)
  Rudy Harrington has spent half his life in a rambling Chicago house, raising three daughters with his independent-minded wife. But his wife has died, his daughters have moved away, and Rudy is restless. In what he interprets as a moment of transcendent vision, he puts the family home up for sale and buys an avocado grove in Texas. While adapting to his new vocation, new home, and new friends, Rudy takes up a book Philosophy Made Simple and begins to struggle with Plato and Aristotle, Hume and Schopenhauer. His newly acquired wisdom is put to the test when he enlists the neighborhood elephant to preside over his daughters Hindu wedding and falls in love with the groom's mother. Hellenga brings back characters from his bestselling The Sixteen Pleasures and introduces many compelling new ones including the elephant, who paints in a novel that illuminates our deepest concerns: love and death, marriage and family, and the mysterious tug of beauty on the human heart.

• Blues Lessons (2002)
  In the lush countryside of 1950s Michigan, young Martin Dijksterhuis has everything he could ever want, living among his extended family and working in his family's orchard fields. Despite his mother's plans for him to attend college in Chicago, he has no desire to leave home.
  
  One autumn, in a camp of migrant farm workers, Martin discovers a music that touches him like nothing before -- the unsettling melodies and timeless words of the country blues. He also falls in love with Corinna, the daughter of the black foreman who runs the orchards. He ends up fathering her child, only to lose her in a stunning betrayal. Martin's music and his love for Corinna are the two themes of his life. His struggle to combine them in a single story takes him far from home and the life he had always envisioned for himself, only to bring him back again in a way he could never have imagined.
  
  In this beautifully rendered novel, Robert Hellenga explores the fragility of happiness, the struggle to discover one's true calling in life, and the sorrows and satisfactions of family.

• The Fall of a Sparrow (1998)
  Alan Woodhull ("Woody"), a classics professor at a small Midwestern college, finds himself convinced that life has taught him all the lessons he has to learn: After the tragic death of his beloved oldest daughter during a terrorist bombing in Italy seven years ago, his wife has left him and his two remaining daughters have grown up and moved away. Yet his decision to attend the trial of the terrorists and to return to the scene of the tragedy marks the beginning of a new life and the awakening of a new love.

• The Sixteen Pleasures (1995)
  Everything about the narrator and heroine of this novel is appealing right from the first paragraph, in which she sets out the basic facts: that she is twenty-nine and a book conservator, and has come to Florence after the famous flood, in 1966, to “save whatever could be saved, including myself.” 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. Although she is attracted to monasticism, her bibliographical dealings involve her instead with a sexy Italian art restorer–against whom the abbess, his cousin, warns her, saying that he has “no soul.” What is amazing here is how intensely you care about everything that happens to this woman, and not just in the obvious matters of love and money: the suspense is so sharp that you find yourself checking ahead to make sure she doesn’t miss a train. Like her, the book is modest, resourceful, and without malice–it is high-minded and fine. So after skipping ahead to slow your heart you go back to read each elegantly moving word. --  The New Yorker