THE OLD MAN BY THE SEA

An old man reflects on his life, his mother, the women he’s loved.

If Starnone’s latest work to appear in English bears certain parallels to a Hemingway novella with a strikingly similar title, that’s intentional—right down to the narrator’s casual remarks to a young boy about the sea monster just out of sight. Starnone’s narrator, Nicola, is an 82-year-old storyteller quietly passing time in a seaside town south of Rome. He sits by the beach, reads, writes, and observes the few townspeople who pass by. “Old age,” he thinks, “offered an even better view on meaninglessness.” If, at least at first, there is a certain tepidity to Nicola (who appears to bear certain similarities to Starnone himself), he is soon roused to a quiet simmering. Lu, a young woman who works in a clothing boutique, inexplicably reminds him of his mother, herself once a dressmaker. Nicola is prompted to reflect not only on his childhood—his life as a whole—but also on the way that he has deliberately constructed that life for himself with the only material available: language. In Starnone’s hands, this book is as much about the futility of writing as it is about anything else. Nicola comments on his own narration—often unimpressed—as he proceeds. “What an incongruous simile,” he thinks, after comparing anchovies swimming with the current to ice. “I just don’t know how to do it anymore, maybe I never did.” Throughout the book (beautifully translated by Stransky), Starnone’s sensitivity, nuance, and subtlety are wonderful to behold—but he doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously, either. Page after page is imbued, alongside everything else, with an achingly sweet humor.

A deceptively simple work and an exquisite addition to Starnone’s oeuvre.