Reviewed by Catherine Parnell
The Old Man by the Sea
By Domenico Starnone
translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky
Europa Editions
ISBN: 9798889661306, August 2025, Paperback, 160 pages
Americans would do well to cross the pond and read the voluminous work of Italian writer Domenico Starnone, author of fifteen best-selling works of fiction. His latest book, The Old Man by the Sea, translated by Oonagh Stransky, is just as compelling and exemplary as his earlier works, and this most recent novel deals with the role memory plays in the direction and construct of a man’s life. What was it Hemingway said in his novel wherein man meets sea? “I may not be as strong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.”
The elderly Nicola hunkers down by the sea, observing kayakers and detectorists, even as he’s on a mission of his own – to unravel his memories of his unconventional mother. Ever the writer, he wonders what, really, is left to be said about what might be found. Plenty, as it turns out and so Nicola turns to his greatest talent, writing important words, although they have begun to elude him. “Even as a young man, I found myself longing for the long threads of words that came easily to me as a teenager, and today I long for them even more fervently, while listlessly going on about wild lotuses, women, anchovies, the way death resembles silver.” Take note of that mention of death, for it’s on the horizon. Yet it’s a shadowy glimmering gold figure he pursues, not death’s figure in iron-black drapery.
Eighty-something years old, Nicola chronicles his observations in his ever-present notebook, for he can no more stop writing than stop breathing. Caught up in the intrigues of small-town life south of Rome, he ponders and conflates the memory of his iridescent mother and her influence on him and others, and the town’s cabalistic doings, only to strike out on his own on a dangerous adventure. What that summary fails to capture is Nicola’s meditative search as he explores the formative and primal influence of his relationship with his mother. That’s ripe psychological territory, which is explored in fits and starts of voluntary and involuntary memory, found bits of evidence telling him something about a lived life. Proustian madeleine, anyone? With memory surfaces an intuition of meaning, what’s at the heart of this enterprise we call life. All the events in Nicola’s life create a complicated tapestry, threads appearing and disappearing over long stretches of time – “catching life on a hook.”
But, as Nicola says, in reference to his age, and perhaps his ability to run after elusive, happy memory, “Even my joie de vivre has a limp.” Combine that limp with his irritation, and Nicola delivers this: “For decades now, I’ve been conjuring up my mother and putting her in places where she is not and could never be – on the ledge of a building at dawn, or looking down from the landing of a house we used to live in – it’s easy enough to do.” And that’s precisely what he does as he trots about gifting the women of the beachside town with erstwhile presents and clothes. Take, for instance, his gift of a dress to a store clerk: “The shopgirl boldly displayed just how the shape of that dress could multiply the joy of being alive.” This is what Nicola seeks – a dollop of his mother’s joy of being alive, and since she no longer is, he casts his gaze on other women, putting his mother in a place she never could be – with him, in the here and now.
It’s no surprise that Nicola reveres women as feminine divine, as objets d’art, not in a dirty or smutty manner, but in an expansive perspective that accepts the feminine as a life force. His offerings bring him closer to his understanding of his mother, when – and the readers will see this – what he seeks is own true self. As his dying mother said to him when he read her one of his stories, Who are you?
If identity is to be found in reviewing “key moments” in life and not be trapped by “sentimental life . . . so full of hiding places,” then Starnone’s novel must be read like a detective novel that travels in time and space, all from the comfort of a beach chair in which an old man sits by the sea, waiting to catch the fish of a lifetime, gold and shimmering, one filled with promise and food for a tired soul.
About the reviewer: Catherine Parnell is a writer, editor, educator, and the Director of Publicity for Arrowsmith Press. She is co-founder of MicroLit and serves on the board of Wrath-Bearing Tree. Her publications include the memoir The Kingdom of His Will, as well as stories, essays, and reviews and interviews in Reckon Review, Compulsive Reader, Five on the Fifth, LEON Literary Review, Cutleaf, Funicular, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, Mud Season Review, Emerge, Orca, West Trade Review, Tenderly, Cleaver, Free State Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Southampton Review, The Baltimore Review, and other literary magazines.