The Old Man by the Sea
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
New Yorker Best Book of 2025
Literary Hub Notable Small Press Book of 2025
Kirkus Best Fiction of 2025
From the author of Ties and The House on Via Gemito
★ “Starnone’s sensitivity, nuance, and subtlety are wonderful to behold.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Domenico Starnone’s The Old Man by the Sea is a slim masterpiece of a novel about an 82-year-old Neapolitan man, Nicola, who has spent his entire life telling stories, becoming very, very good at it. In words, with his pen, in the notebook he carries with him everywhere, he records life’s minutiae, its ephemera, those vibrating essences and almost imperceptible atoms of existence that most of us barely notice but that constitute the very stuff of life. Yes, recording the universe in each grain of sand has become second nature to Nicola. But of course, there is always something that escapes. Something unnamable that resists, remaining on the margins, slithering away, a movement intuited rather than identified. And this fact, for Nicola, is a source of deep anxiety and a growing sense of failure.
Now, ensconced in a house on the dunes south of Rome, Nicola spends his mornings writing, watching the waves, and observing Lu, a store clerk in her twenties whose graceful canoeing stirs faint echoes of his mother—a glamorous, headstrong woman who defied convention with her beauty and creativity. As Nicola reflects on the women who shaped him and the passions he has never outgrown, he finds himself drawn into the nefarious intrigues of the small seaside town and its inhabitants. He will end by embarking on an improbable and ill-advised kayak adventure of his own with Lu’s young son, as Starnone himself brings this slim, virtuoso novel about eros and melancholy, memory and reinvention, age and imagination, to an unexpected conclusion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this smoldering mood piece from Starnone (The House on Via Gemito), an 82-year-old accomplished author persists in his life's work despite his physical and mental decline. Nico, who has come to the Italian seaside to die, fills a notebook with every passing observation. In the meantime, he lingers at the water's edge, spying on locals as he combs the beach with a metal detector or teaches himself to kayak. He takes special interest in a much younger shop assistant named Lu, and buys her gifts. Secondary characters such as oafish shop-owner Silvestro, would-be-writer Gino, and philosophical crank Maurizio take the gestures as Nico's show of chivalry. In fact, Nico is drawn to Lu because she reminds him of his mother, whose memory he hopes to reconstruct, having come to believe that words and stories "train the brain not to be satisfied with appearances." Eventually, Nico's fanciful imagination propels the story from its placid surface to dark waters. The turn is foreshadowed by Silvestro, who, annoyed at Nico for charming his beautiful and unsatisfied wife, claims there's a "serpent lurking deep inside" him. The result is an evocative glimpse into a man's inner world.
