Sandro Veronesi | |
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Born | 1959 Florence, Tuscany, Italy |
Occupation | Novelist, writer |
Nationality | Italian |
Notable works | La forza del passato, Caos calmo |
Website | |
www |
Sandro Veronesi, born in Florence, Tuscany in 1959, is an Italian novelist, essayist, and journalist. After earning a degree in architecture at the University of Florence, he opted for a writing career in his mid to late twenties. Veronesi published his first book at the age of 25, a collection of poetry (Il resto del cielo, 1984) that has remained his only venture into verse writing. What has followed since includes five novels, three books of essays, one theatrical piece, numerous introductions to novels and collections of essays, interviews, screenplay, and television programs.
Il resto del cielo consists of twenty-five short compositions, none longer than fourteen verses, that speak to the general problematics of communication, all of which is underscored by a constant coincidentia oppositorum. Seemingly simple verses, they speak eloquently to the narrating voice's quotidian landscape.
His first novel, Per dove parte questo treno allegro (1988), is the story of a typical relationship of the 1980s between father and son. A troubled rapport between them, the father is an adventurous businessman who, while deep in debt, has squirreled away a few hundred thousand dollars in Switzerland. The son, an insipid thirty-year-old, who acts half his age, is a do-nothing with strange habits. While the two spend a few strained weeks together, their lives eventually begin to find some similarities.
With his second novel, Gli sfiorati (1990), Veronesi approaches the family thematics in a much more dramatic fashion. A family recomposed of two previously split ones, here too the father and son experience a troubled relationship. Mete, however, finds comfort in a developing rapport with his beautiful stepsister. All this takes place in Rome, intertwined with other narratives of various social types that one might expect to find in such a chaotic metropolis that Veronesi depicts. Experimental, in some ways, this novels verges on the fantastic, while the author offers up a portrait of the early 1990s and its polymorphous, youthful generation, represented herein by the literal, and metaphorical, sign of "schiumevolezza."
Faithful to the theme of troubled relationships between two people of different generations, Venite venite B-52 (1995) changes the dynamics to that of father-daughter. As he did in his previous novels, especially in Gli sfiorati, here too Veronesi offers up a gallery of extraordinary characters, beginning with the father, Ennio Miraglia, a representation of the 1980s consumerist Italy, and his daughter Viola, whose desire to free herself of her father's Italy is underscored in the novel's title, her hopes that the American bombers come and destroy that which she abhors.