The Old Man by the Sea

A slim, virtuoso novel about age and imagination, by one of Italy’s greatest contemporary writers

82-year-old Nicola has spent his entire life telling stories, and 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 almost imperceptible atoms of existence that most of us barely notice. Recording the universe in each grain of sand has become second nature to Nicola. But there is always something that escapes, remaining on the margins, 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. As Nicola reflects on the women who shaped him and the passions he has never outgrown, he finds himself drawn into the intrigues of the small seaside town. He will end by embarking on an improbable and ill-advised kayak adventure of his own with Lu’s young son, as Starnone brings his tale about memory and reinvention to an unexpected conclusion.