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.
