8/365: My House in Umbria by William Trevor

My House in Umbria by William Trevor Rating: ★★★ Publication Date: January 1, 1991 Genre: fiction Pages: 155 ReRead?: No Mrs. Emily Delahunty-a mysterious and not entirely trustworthy former madam-quietly runs a pensione in the Italian countryside and writes romance novels while she muses on her checkered past. Then one day her world is changed forever as the train she is riding in is blown up by terrorists. Taken to a local hospital to recuperate, she befriends the other survivors-an elderly English general, an American child, and a German boy-and takes them all to convalesce at her villa, with unforeseen results.

I have a truly huge omnibus of William Trevor’s short stories that I have barely cracked. I’ve read just enough to know that he reminds me a bit of a male, Irish analogue to Alice Munro’s Canadian female writer.  If I were just rating the quality of writing, this would be rated higher than 3 stars, but the story was so strange and unsettling that I didn’t particularly enjoy it. This is an odd little novella.

The cover and the title lulled me into a false sense that it would be something like Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April – a bit of found family, a healing interlude in the Italian countryside.

Ummmm, nope. Not at all. It starts out fairly straightforwardly, with an introduction to Emily Delahunty as she boards an Italian train. Emily is an observer of human nature – she has written and published several romance novels and we see her taking note, and filling in backstories, for the other people in her train car. However, once the train car blows up and she awakens in a hospital bed, things, like the train, derail a bit.

Ultimately, Emily invites the only three other survivors of the attack to convalesce in her house – an older Colonel, a young German amputee and an American child named Aimee, who is about ten years old. Aimee is left an orphan, with her sole surviving relative an uncle from America named Mr. Riversmith.

All three of the adults become very attached to Aimee, who is going to be returning to America with Riversmith once he arrives and she is cleared for travel. Once Riversmith arrives, things really get weird and Emily’s grip on reality grows increasingly tenuous. It’s more and more difficult to distinguish between the stories she tells herself and the reality, and her behavior with Riversmith is extremely unsettling, culminating in a disturbing interaction in the middle of the night which no doubt left Riversmith thinking that he was staying in the house of a crazy person.

The writing here is beautiful – clean and clear and evocative, and the character studies are well-drawn. I wavered between reading this one and The Story of Lucy Gault, and I’m sort of wishing I had read it instead. I’ll get to eventually, though, along with the rest of those short stories.