Book Review from the Manchester Guardian

Il Colibri /The Hummingbird by Sandro Veronesi

Let us pray for him, and for all the ships out at sea,” writes Sandro Veronesi, in both the opening and closing chapters of his novel The Hummingbird. Bookended like a call to prayer, Veronesi’s most acclaimed work, recently published in English, is a reflective and hopeful contemporary take on the Italian family saga, following Marco Carrera, a middle-class family man who manages to hover over the chaos of his life as winds of change threaten to blow him off course. 

The Hummingbird has captivated European readers, selling more than 300,000 copies in Italy alone and making Veronesi only the second author to win the Premio Strega, Italy’s most prestigious literary award, twice. The film adaptation is in production in Italy, starring Nanni Moretti (winner of the Cannes Palm d’Or) and Bérénice Bejo (nominated for an Oscar for her role in The Artist) and the novel hashe work has already been translated into 24 languages, with Elena Pala’s English translation lauded by Ian McEwan among others.

The book is unconventional, cutting between narrative passages, emails and phone calls over eight decades, even reaching into the future to 2030, thus keeping the reader constantly alert. “It is rhapsodic,” Veronesi says; he structured it around the workings of human memory. “It shows that even the most dramatic and painful moments have an ‘after’ in which one can return to live peacefully.”

With many of Veronesi’s past works drawing heavily on his own life, it’s tempting to look for him in Carrera, his protagonist, but he rejects the comparison: “I don’t reflect myself in Marco Carrera. He is not even a projection of who I might have been … If he were a real person, I would like to be his friend, and, above all, his tennis doubles partner.”