Three Marvelous Weekend Reads:  “The Hummingbird,” “Birthday Party,” & “Cakes and Ale”

Here are three recommendations for good weekend reads, which should appeal to readers of different tastes and moods, including a classic by W. Somerset Maugham, whose 150^th birthday was on January 25 this year.

Birthday Party by C. H. B. Kitchin.  Published in 1938, this brilliant novel is the story of Carlice Abbey, a crumbling country house with a beautiful garden.  There are four narrators, the elderly Isabel Carlice, who grew up at Carlice Abbey, her silly sister-in-law, Dora, her radical nephew, Ronald, who will inherit when he turns 21, and Stephen Payne, Dora’s lover. 

If you like Shirley Jackson’s novels, particularly We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this may appeal to you.  The four narrators have very different voices and perspectives on the value of Calice Abbey, and what begins as a cozy English novel turns unexpectedly creepy. 

The Hummingbird, by Sandro Veronesi, translated by Elena Pala.  Veronesi won the Premio Strega Prize for The Hummingbird in 2020. 

This lively novel  jumps back and forth in time to reveal events in the life of Marco  Carrera, an ophthalmologist and family man, and takes us from his childhood in the 1970s up to his death in 2030. 

A  first-person-plural narrator (“Here we go…”) announces on page 2 that  one of the seminal events in his life is about to occur.  “Outside…destiny is lying in wait in the shape of a little man named Daniele Carradori.”  Carradori is Marco’s  wife’s therapist, and his decision to break protocol changes everything.

Written in the form of letters, postcards,  dialogues, inventories, and traditional narrative, the novel tells the story of four generations of Marco’s family. Marco, the only member of his family not in therapy, tries to make everyone happy and to connect the dots of family history.  His parents fight constantly in whispers, which deeply disturbs his older sister, whose first suicide attempt Marco aborts, though her second attempt succeeds, traumatizing everybody.

Marco corresponds for years with his lover, Luisa, with whom he has a mostly chaste relationship;  he also corresponds with his brother, who left the country years ago and has no interest in Marco’s inventory of their parents’ vintage-’60s furniture. He will not even accept his father’s rare collection of a valuable vintage series of 1,000 science fiction books, only four of which are missing. Marco’s letters are cheerful and funny, and he tries to keep everything together in the face of entropy.

Marco’s own small nuclear family is also very fragile. His wife is a compulsive liar and a promiscuous flight attendant, who has tried to fake normalcy for years, and even her mother covered up her mental health issues before the marriage. Their gifted daughter imagines an invisible string  attached to her back, which she must disentangle whenever anyone walks behind her. 

All of them are in therapy, except Marco, who, for that very reason, does not trust therapists. And he tries to save them all.

But there is one exception. In high school one of his best friends, a compulsive gambler nicknamed The Omen, saves Marco’s life when Omen freaks out on a plane and screams that they’re all going to die.  The two boys are kicked off the plane, and the  plane does crash, and everybody does die. 

The Omen wins life for them, but the incident is terrifying and traumatic. And on this occasion the laid-back Marco nervously betrays his friend  by gossiping about the haunting incident. Already considered a freak, the friend is now a double pariah. 

Poor Omen, poor Marco.

Cakes and Ale, by W. Somerset Maugham. This is my favorite novel by Maugham, a  witty book about the perils of the authorized biography. The narrator, William Ashenden, is invited to spend the weekend with the elderly Edward Driffield, a writer loosely based on Thomas Hardy, and the second Mrs. Driffield, who has hired Alroy Kear, a sycophantic popular novelist, to write her husband’s authorized biography.  Mrs. Driffield and Alroy hope to convince Ashenden to help them edit some of the more embarrassing details about Rosie, the first Mrs. Driffield, a lower-class barmaid.  Instead, Ashenden, who knew and loved Rosie and Edward when he was a boy, gives us own charming version of their story.

Happy Weekend! Happy Easter!