Two women who “had never yet spoken” see an advertisement for a castle to rent in Italy, and one persuades the other to spend their savings and take a month’s holiday there. To lower the costs, they advertise for some other ladies to join them and so four very different women find themselves thrown together in ‘heaven’.
At first the ladies find themselves at odds with one another, but during their stay the enchantments of their surroundings serve to bring out each person’s true character, buried beneath years of unhappy marriage and misunderstandings and the drudgery of daily life, and giving each of them “the happiness that asks for nothing, that just accepts, just breathes, just is.” Each character is given time to reflect, each gradually changes and each receives their own realisation of happiness by the end of the book.
This is by no means a realistic plot, and many of the events seem contrived, but the humour and warmth with which the novel is narrated overrode any quibbles I had with the story itself. And the humour is what makes the story really magical, several parts made me laugh out loud but this was my favourite:
“Mrs Fisher had never cared for macaroni, especially not this long, worm-shaped variety. She found it difficult to eat – slippery, wriggling off her fork, making her look, she felt, undignified when, having got it as she supposed into her mouth, ends of it yet hung out. Always too, when she ate it she was reminded of Mr Fisher. He had during their married life behaved very much like macaroni. He had slipped, he had wriggled, he had made her feel undignified, and when at last she had got him safe, as she thought, there had invariably been little bits of him that still, as it were, hung out.”
This is one of those classics which felt effortless to read, is very uplifting and is also very funny. Highly recommended escapism.
A Literary Re-Education 