The Old Man by the Sea

Nicola, the eighty-two-year-old Neapolitan at the heart of Domenico Starnone’s novel The Old Man by the Sea, translated from Italian by Oonagh Stransky, is an aging writer struggling to write. After retreating to a seaside town south of Rome with the intention of completing a novel, Nicola, or Nico, finds himself unable to move forward without first confronting certain memories he has long avoided. The title clearly echoes Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, published nearly seventy-five years ago—and both books depict one man’s test of will: Where Hemingway’s Santiago is bent on capturing an elusive marlin that has evaded fishermen for generations, Nico desires to make sense of his life.

Santiago is salao, or unlucky, but this unluckiness does not dissuade him from returning to sea even after failing to make a catch for over eighty days. Nico, in many ways salao himself, confronts his own mental blocks in his effort to write, for his past bubbles up and interrupts his present with long-forgotten images, or, as he calls them, “intrusions.” After retiring from his life as a magistrate, he has developed a pleasant routine of walking to the beach, completing his writing exercises, and observing townspeople. But his perception, frequently distorted by these “intrusions,” becomes a confused reality. When he observes a young woman in the distance one morning, he becomes transfixed by her movements as his own memories surface, and as the days pass, she becomes a composite of the important women from his past: his mother, three ex-wives, and his granddaughter. As the novel progresses, the memories tormenting him most—his mother in her final days of life, his ex-wives near the end of each marriage—are in conflict with his sweetest memories: those of his granddaughter and those of his mother when she was young, before illness overtook her.

The novel progresses from Nico watching this woman from afar to him gradually growing close to her. When he first sees Lu on the beach, her image unearths pleasant memories of his mother in a sundress, beautiful and young; as the novel continues, however, he wrestles with memories of his mother in her old age, ill with liver disease. Nico’s pursuit of friendship with Lu becomes a process of unlocking and deciphering his conflicting memories. After running into Lu at the boutique where she works, he browses clothing before asking her to try on a dress he has selected, both longing for and haunted by memories of his mother. Such memories become a frequent topic of his own writing.

The Old Man by the Sea is a mixture of Nico’s often brief, observational “writing exercises” and his unmediated first-person narration. Starnone moves fluidly between these two modes; in one paragraph, for instance, Nico completes a writing exercise in which he describes how “the sand, blown in by the hot wind, burnished [his] ankles,” only to torture himself over his word choice later: “For God’s sake, burnished, it’s so true that the older you get, the worse you write.” Indeed, we often remain uncertain when Nico’s writing exercises end and when his narration begins. This uncertainty reflects the very nature of his character, as he fuses reality and memory in both thought and writing. Despite this uncertainty, the narrator’s most lucid moments are moments of utter embodiment: when he is in the kayak on the water with Lu, neither writing nor thinking too much. Starnone’s meditation on writer’s block, then, is infused with a specific kind of sentimentality, in which the body has the power to repossess a fickle mind.

Nico remembers his mother as an “unexpressed burden” in his life, and he seeks in Lu both a relief from and an explanation of this burden. When he observes Lu carrying a canoe down to the water, he narrates, “For a short spell my mother is both the canoe and the girl, but she seems on edge, scared, and so do I.” Intrigued and conflicted by his own idea of Lu, Nico buys himself a kayak. When Lu eventually sets out to teach Nico how to use the kayak, she both commands and encourages him, embodying a mother figure. He is determined to please her by being a good student, even as he wrestles with painful memories of his mother.

For much of the novel, Nico hovers around the topic of love. He rarely mentions his past lovers, and he even avoids the possibility of new romance when Lu’s boss, a married woman, pursues him. For most of the novel, he also withholds an explanation of how his marriages ended and what it was that he “couldn’t give” his ex-wives. In his recollections of these past marriages, he imagines love as materially definite—a “shared schemata,” a “woven wicker basket”—so that he can avoid accountability for failing in those marriages.

As Nico and Lu’s friendship develops, Lu is surprised to learn that Nico, even at his age, still wrestles with his love life. “Are you tired of feeling desire?” she asks. Nico responds by saying that desire doesn’t disappear, but time allows the “intensity to fade.” Lu can’t stand this answer, however; she wishes to be rid of desire and the torture it inflicts on her—she wants to live as she had previously imagined Nico, an aging man, must live. But desire, or the effect of past desires, seems to torment Nico. One night he dreams of women emerging from water and revitalizing themselves on lotus flowers before clawing out their own stomachs, and the dream ends when he himself turns into a woman. Envisioning himself as what torments him most is the only way he may reckon with his tangled, claustral past.

Nico believes that his mother “never saw herself for who she truly was,” yet he proves equally unable to present himself authentically: his narrative is shaped by evasion. Just as he sees his mother in Lu from afar, he cannot fathom a woman in her entirety up close: his mother, his ex-wives, and Lu are indefinable. And this problem—the inability to see a person for what he or she truly is—is what Nico suffers from. He tries and fails repeatedly to understand his own life as a sum of memories, but he is unable to place himself in time or space. Nico must write, erase, and confess the very things he has withheld from us.