THE HUMMINGBIRD

I stumbled across this book by chance and am so glad I did. Beautiful story, full of life’s joys and sorrows. Beautiful writing.

A supreme author that lives his work through curiosity and style of the literate world. Thoroughly worthwhile reading. I got the impression that Marco was not a hummingbird because he stood still in his life but because he found his necture from places that required his full being. Maybe these are the same thing. Absolutely brilliant.

Lovely story. Takes you inside their world. What is it like knowing that you are going to die? What to say?

The translator could use a refresher course in English pronouns. There were many errors that made me cringe. 😖 The worst was on the last page: “Your mine and I’m yours” ruined the ending for me. The author deserved a better translation. And where was the editor?

Marco Carrera suffers serial tragedy in life. Most of us suffer the loss of our parents, but Marco also has to cope with the death of his sister, his daughter, and finally with his own death. He marries impetuously and disastrously, but manages a lifelong failure to engage his seemingly true love, who eventually rejects him for his ‘hummingbird’ tendency to put huge effort into standing still and never developing. He is estranged from his brother, and the close friend of his early life. The only tragedy he avoids is the Larnaca airplane crash. The one purpose of his life is projected onto his granddaughter who is bizarrely presented without meaning as ‘the Man of the Future’.Sandro Veronesi offers all this in multi-layered snippets across time, much of it in the form of e-mails, letters, and phone calls. If you don’t read it in one sitting, then you have to remember the thread, or reading becomes disoriented. Veronesi frequently interjects his own comment on postmodern society, lamenting for example the practice of sales people discretely turning away when a customer enters their PIN number into a terminal. Whilst interest is more engaged in the second half, there is no story, no plot, no deeper character study. It’s a flat, limp book.