Villa Bunker

A dilapidated seaside villa whose interior opens upon a landscape of memory and madness is the setting for this story about the ways our homes come to define our personalities.

The narrator of "Villa Bunker" receives letters, dozens of them, written by his mother in an isolated seaside villa, which tell of his parents' troubles in this uninhabitable house, soon to become a kind of labyrinth roamed by memories and long-buried emotions. At first the narrator's parents fret most about the villa's physical deterioration, but soon their own psychological deterioration becomes the inescapable focus of their stories. Is their joint madness due to the villa's aberrant architecture? Or is its isolation to blame? Or were they mad all along? The narrator is left to decipher the clues, himself in turn becoming prey to his own house, which, like memory and time, seems in a state of permanent metamorphosis.