The Old Man by the Sea, by Domenico Starnone

The week before last I went to a book event at a bookstore in the neighborhood where I lived as a teenager – a neighborhood I was surprised to find had a bookstore now. I already knew I would be buying two books: the one for the event I was attending, and Molly Crabapple's Here Where We Live is Our Country, which I had been meaning to pick up. And besides, I wanted to support this bookstore in my old neighborhood. I browsed the fiction while I was waiting for the event to start and I saw The Old Man By the Sea. Domenico Starnone is a perennial favorite of mine, and so I decided to get a third book while I was there.

I will usually finish a Domenico Starnone book in a day or two. All the ones I've read  – this one included – are quite short. But last week was busy and it ended up taking me a full week. I read about half of it on the train to and from a visit upstate for the holiday weekend. ("Oh, Hemingway!" exclaimed my neighbor on the train ride up. "Actually, no," I said.)

Like (or perhaps even more than) the other Starnone books I've read, The Old Man by the Sea feels like autofiction. The narrator is an 82-year-old author who has rented a condo by the sea in the early autumn in the last warm days. He meets and becomes entangled with some of the locals, two shop owners who turn out to be husband and wife, a shop assistant at the wife's clothing store, and an assortment of other connected friends, lovers, and family members. The narrator is visibly writing the story, breaking the narrative from time to time to comment on his own writing. Meanwhile, he is trying to summon the ghost of his mother, who died young many years earlier. 

I have to admit I didn't like The Old Man by the Sea as well as the other Starnones, but mostly that's to do with the strength of the others. The Old Man by the Sea wasn't quite so captivating. As to the others, mainly what I remember is that they were strong, not why. I read Ties during a period when I was not writing about the books I read, but I've gone back to read what I wrote after reading Trick and Trust because I don't recall much about them. I do remember that I loved Trust especially.  

On the Calculation of Volume IV, by Solvej Balle; Zorba the Greek, by Nikos Kazantzakis

I actually finished On the Calculation of Volume IV a few weeks ago, but I never got around to writing it up. I'm not sure I actually have a lot to say about it, though I continue to love these books. While reading this one, I found myself sort of wishing I had waited to read the whole series until they were all available, perhaps in a single volume. I seem to only have patience for short books these days, but I've read each one of these books faster than the last. I finished IV in 2 days. 

I know I wrote something along these lines when I finished III, but I find it very interesting how each of these books has its own trajectory or theme, inside the larger context of the ever-repeated day. When I read about these books, and after I'd read the first one, I did wonder how Balle could sustain interest in and endless string of November 18ths. it's not a question I have anymore. 

I think when V comes out, or maybe just when the last book arrives, I want to go back and read them all together, and maybe then I'll feel like writing more too.

I started Zorba the Greek more than three years ago, in February 2023. I'd had it in mind to read as my book for Greece in my world books project and then in a happy accident, I found a copy on the sidewalk one day. I'm not sure what led me to start it in 2023, but I read it for a few days that February and then for a few days in April of that year, and after reading about 90 pages, I stopped. I was, around that time, starting and abandoning lots of books; having trouble sticking to anything. (A challenge I still have, though I think I'm just starting fewer books now.) I remember enjoying the writing and ideas in Zorba, but it was a slog. 

I'm going to Greece next month, for the first time, and that's what impelled me to return to Zorba. I thought I remembered enough that I could just pick up where I left off, and so I did. It came back to me quickly. I still found the reading a bit of a slog, but I kept going – mostly reading one chapter at a time – and finished the book in two weeks and change. 

When I first had the idea for my world books reading project, I had already identified some problems with it, one of which I called the problem of White Men. When you set out to read the Great Novel of any place, you're bound to end of reading mostly books my white men of a certain age. In all the books I've read for my project, I think Zorba may be the one where I have felt this the most. While race isn't so much a factor here, Kazantzakis' narrator is a young, wealthy, educated Cretan man, who returns to his homeland after travels around Europe and becomes enamored with the simple, real life he finds among the peasants on the island, and especially with Zorba – whom he meets on his travels and brings along. 

The narrator, who has lived more a life of the mind (and whom Zorba calls a pen-pusher) feels he has become disconnected from the real world and admires Zorba for his simplicity, his wisdom gained without books, his true example of manliness. As a reader, I coudn't understand the narrator's fascination with Zorba. I related with the narrator in certain ways – I really understood his sense of rational detachment, and maybe even his desire to escape that feeling – but not in his feeling that his intellectual life was less real than the physical life Zobra represents. 

I was looking for a passage I wanted to note, but I seem to have forgotten what page it was on. At one point, Zorba and the narrator are climbing up mountain to visit a monastery because they need permission to build on the monks' land. The visit to the religious site reminds the narrator of experiences from his his youth. He describes his enjoyment in the spectacle of religious festivals as a child, while now that he is grown, he only relates to religion aesthetically. I felt this very strongly – I had a real fascination with religion as a teenager, without being a religious person. Teenage emotions are so strong, I think I was hoping for something external to give it all some meaning. Around this time I was studying art and art history. I'm not sure why it spoke to me so deeply, but I developed a real affection for medieval and northern renaissance paintings. I still love art from this period, but if my attraction to it solely aesthetic, so what? Where Zorba's narrator seemed to see it as a weakness, I see it as maturity. I don't feel it as a loss.

In the end, I'm left feeling ambivalent about Zorba the Greek. There were ideas I loved, there were some stunning passages. There was also casual violence, extreme misogyny, and some deeply problematic ideas about humanity. But I'm glad I finished it.