#RivetingReviews: Enrica Ferrara reviews THE OLD MAN BY THE SEA by Domenico Starnone, translated by Oonagh Stransky

Domenico Starnone’s The Old Man by the Sea – in Oonagh Stransky’s virtuoso translation – is a delicate, haunting reflection on aging, memory, desire, and the art of storytelling. The novel’s protagonist, 82-year-old Nico (quite obviously an avatar of DomeNico), is a writer who retreats to a rented house in a seaside town south of Rome. Armed with a notebook and pencil, he listlessly records quotidian details whilst ‘dozing off’ and reminiscing about his past. Suddenly, a ripple in the smooth surface of things pushes both character and reader to the borders between reality and fiction. A sparkling gold figurine appears, so vivid and bright that for a moment we are led to believe in its actual existence. It is just a memory, it turns out, but Nico is so startled by this image that, not only does he try to fix it on paper, but he stands up and runs after it. What Nico does, and Starnone with him, is to open the door of his secret workshop and allow us to get a glimpse of how the storytelling process works, from first inception to the final product. It all starts with a daydream or an hallucination that imposes its presence and demands the writer’s attention. From this perspective, the apparition that haunts Nico is reminiscent of the otherworldly ‘ghosts’ of dead relatives tormenting the artist Daniele Mallarico, protagonist of Trick (trans. Jhumpa Lahiri, 2018). In fact, Nico’s phantasmic image is a family member too, namely his mother Rosa, a woman of striking beauty, an object of oedipal love and a receptacle for elusive meanings: the personal memory Nico retains of her has been erased by the false accounts that her jealous husband layered over her life. 

Readers of The House on Via Gemito (trans. Oonagh Stransky, longlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize), a masterpiece that elsewhere I defined as Starnone’s ‘ur-text’, will recognize the characters of Rusinè and Federí, the archetypal mother and father modelled on the writer’s own parents. We may wonder why the author is revisiting the same themes and will realize that while The House on Via Gemito was the story of a mythologized, deferred and ultimately averted ‘parricide’ that enabled the construction of Domenico’s identity as a writer, what was still left to tackle was the theme of the idealized mother. This is precisely what is pursued in The Old Man by the Sea in which, masterfully and ironically, the writer introduces us to Nico’s clumsy attempts at chasing down the image of his own mother in the silhouette, posture and youthful energy of Lu, a shop assistant and canoeist he meets by chance.  

Other characters come alive in the narrative through Starnone’s unparalleled brilliance: for example, the boutique owner Evelina and her clients performing a memorable fashion show in front of Nico in which clothes metonymically allude to the female body as an object of desire, and metaphorically stand for the fabric of language which alternatively veils and reveals the truth. This scene is also a nod to the process of storytelling, if it is true that, as Starnone mentioned in Reading in Translation: literature is the sudden disintegration of the verbal fabric of everyday life.

Another iconic character is the retired professor Maurizio who lost his job because he was hated by his students and now entertains himself with a metal detector (is Starnone suggesting that uninspired teachers should be chasing their wealth in other ways rather than failing as educators?). While Maurizio is certainly a parody, we cannot fail to note the subtle links to Trust (trans. Jhumpa Lahiri, 2021) and other earlier narratives about teachers and the higher education system, also penned by Starnone. Perhaps, The Old Man by the Sea is a sort of summary of everything I haven’t been able to write well, to paraphrase what Nico says at the end of the novel, as well as a self-deprecating and melancholic look at the narcissistic delusion of grandeur that besets many writers. In this case, the epic battle with the whale of Hemingway’s novel is echoed in the struggle of an old man with his own ghosts and the limitations of his vulnerable body as he attempts to conquer the sea on a kayak, guided by young Lu, during a truly exhilarating finale. Starnone’s voice is not easy to capture and this novel was particularly challenging to translate given its layered emotional registers, constantly shifting between elegy, parody, the quotidian and the oneiric. Stransky confirms both her ability to render the psychological nuances of the characters and her confident creativity in bending the resources of the English language, producing a text full of humour and extremely enjoyable.

Reviewed by Enrica Ferrara

THE OLD MAN BY THE SEA

Written by Domenico Starnone

Translated by Oonagh Stransky

Published by Europa Editions (2025)

December 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

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Enrica Ferrara lives in Dublin where she lectures at Trinity College. She has written widely about Italo Calvino, Elena Ferrante, Domenico Starnone and other leading Italian writers. Her debut novel in Italian, Mia madre aveva una Cinquecento gialla, was awarded the Rapallo prize for fiction in 2024.

Read Enrica Ferrara’s #‎RivetingReview of THE TRIUMPH OF THE LIONS and FALL OF THE FLORIOS by Stefania Auci, translated by Howard Curtis and Katherine Gregor

Read Enrica Ferrara’s #‎RivetingReview of PERFECTION by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes

Read Enrica Ferrara’s #‎RivetingReview of ROMAN STORIES by Jhumpa Lahiri