by Rick Henry

The writing life of Domenico Starnone, grand master of the Italian literary scene, is filled with novels, screenplays, awards, film adaptations, and translations of his works into a growing number of languages. In the autumn of 2025, The Old Man by the Sea joined a half-dozen other Starnone titles available in English, and it makes as fine an introduction to his work as any. The premise of this short novel is simple: Eighty-two-year-old writer Nicola has come to a small sea-side town for the summer and rented a house on the beach to write. From time to time, readers are privy to what and how he is writing and revising, and even to what he simply crosses out for the crime of being badly written.

Starnone invites multiple comparisons with Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 novella The Old Man and the Sea—beyond using a very similar title, he shares Hemingway’s attention to women and the feminine, as well as to a sea “beast”—yet there are notable contrasts as well. Hemingway’s Santiago is a fisherman; after more than eighty days without catching anything, Santiago hooks a marlin larger than his boat, and mayhem ensues when sharks attack the marlin. Starnone’s old man has a quieter existential struggle: sitting by the sea, watching people on the beach, he writes, always with an overlying filter of his own life and its vagaries of memory; the only thing that ensues is Nicola’s sense of futility.

Fortunately, there’s a playful quality to this futility; as Nicola says late in the novel, “Writing about what really happens is pointless; actually, precisely because these notes are so clear, they risk disrupting things.” Starnone invites us to read the book as a series of disruptions informed by the eternal tension (and slippages) between reality and fiction. As for the ending, Nicola admits that he is “leaning” toward a happy one, and acknowledges that in fiction, he could make it so. In real life, of course, that boundary is in constant flux, like edges of all kinds—including the beach, that primordial border between sea and land, calm and tempest, mayhem and futility. Skimming along it are metal detectors and makers of literature alike, searching for something precious below the surface.