The Hummingbird

Starred review from October 18, 2021
A 40-year-old ophthalmologist becomes enmeshed in a morass of family troubles and careless decisions in Veronesi’s Strega Prize–winning latest (after Quiet Chaos). In Rome at the brink of the new millennium, Marco Carrera, known by his childhood nickname “the hummingbird” for his diminutive stature, is having an affair while his wife does the same. His parents were glaringly mismatched, and his siblings, one of whom died many years earlier, are depicted through the nonlinear narrative as depressed, suicidal, or just plain estranged. Rather than marrying Luisa, Marco’s longtime love, he had opted for Marina, a flight attendant he first sees on a TV news program, during which she describes how she’d narrowly avoided a shift on an ill-fated flight. They have a daughter, but Marco endures years of disappointments and Marina’s adulterous betrayals. Meanwhile, he’s secretly struck up a correspondence with Luisa. A chaotic black comedy of blunders ensues as the narrative volleys back and forth between Carrera’s youth and the present through dashes of poetry, emails, postcards, and dialogue, while running commentary from an omnipresent third-person chimes in with penetrating insight (on relationships: “It should be common knowledge—and yet it isn’t—that the course of every new relationship is set from the start, once and for all, every time”). Cleverly structured like a jigsaw puzzle, the story’s disparate pieces are overlaid and slowly developed, such as the details of Marco’s sister’s death. A senseless tragedy, splashes of levity, and unexpected poignancy bring this to a moving conclusion. Veronesi’s dark modern chronicle shimmers with intelligence and flashes of pathos.

November 15, 2021
One man's life story, told in nonchronological fragments. This sprawling novel encompasses the life of Marco Carrera from early childhood to old age. Celebrated Italian novelist Veronesi skips backward and forward through the timeline of his protagonist's life, deploying not only traditional third-person prose, but also letters, dialogue, and even an academic talk to tell his story. The bulk of the novel is dedicated to Marco's relationships with the women in his life. As a young man in Florence, Marco falls in love with his neighbor Luisa, with whom his brother is also infatuated; as an adult, he carries on a platonic affair with her that fractures his marriage. He remains close, however, to his daughter, Adele, whose childhood attachment to him manifests as a fantasy that she has a thread attached to her back. Later, he grows even closer to his granddaughter, Miraijin, who winds up becoming a famous activist. Veronesi's unconventional narrative approach is, at first, beguiling. As the book progresses, however, the author's troubling depictions of women detract from his novel's strengths. We find out that Marco fell in love with Luisa when she was 13 and he was 20, a detail the novel fails to acknowledge. Meanwhilie, Marco's "clinically insane" wife, Marina, brings a petition of divorce against him that includes false allegations of abuse when she finds out about his relationship with Luisa. The novel's greatest failure, though, is Miraijin, whom Veronesi describes in uncomfortably sexual terms and as "the literal embodiment of the utopian ideals of multiculturalism." Unsurprisingly, she never feels like a real person. An intriguing but ultimately disappointing experiment in fictional biography.

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December 1, 2021

A second Premio Strega winner (also named Best Book of the Year by Corriere della Sera, among Italy's oldest newspapers), from Veronesi (Quiet Chaos), one of Italy's most beloved authors. For his whole life, Italian ophthalmologist Marco Carerra has had two passions: his belief in the importance of family and his lifelong, albeit chaste, love for Luisa. His story, told in a fluid patchwork of narratives, letters, texts, emails, and transcribed phone calls that move back and forth in time, follows his childhood as he remains oblivious of his parents' miserable marriage, to his teen years as a gifted athlete on high alert over the safety of his deeply troubled older sister, to a young adulthood marked by his successful gamble on his own challenging marriage to Marina and his devotion to their daughter, Adele. All these pieces are on a steady collision course that challenges Marco's frantic efforts to keep whole all that he cherishes the most. VERDICT Veronesi has penned a powerful Shakespearean tale of one man's life, filled with tragedy, loss, and star-crossed love. A cautionary tale for our turbulent times, exquisitely rendered by translator Pala; Veronesi's final chapter is sure to garner much examination as a prescient warning of what may lie ahead.--Beth Andersen, formerly at Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2022
It is hard to say if Italian ophthalmologist Marco Carrera has seen a greater portion of life's tragedies than many. His beloved sister, Irene, dies by suicide when Marco is still a teenager. Years later, Dr. Carrera loses an extremely close family member. He himself narrowly misses dying in a plane crash and longs for the true love of his life, Luisa Lattes. Nevertheless, Carrera finds reasons to live--whether it's his granddaughter Miraijin, tennis, or simply a beautiful sunset. Dramatizing the arc of Carrera's life through flashbacks, emails, poetry, and phone messages, Veronesi draws a sumptuous portrait of a character whose failings are his biggest charm and who wrestles with sibling and parental issues like most of us. Known as a hummingbird for his short stature as a child, the description fits him later as "he reacted to change like he'd always done in the past: he simply stood still in the middle of the desolation that surrounded and inhabited that desolation." This is a moving reminder that even the most ordinary lives are peppered with touches of the extraordinary. As a character says, "It doesn't take much, after all: decent weather, a few hugs, a kiss on the mouth."

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