In his first novel, Il salto con le aste (1989), Domenico Starnone presented two young boys determined to escape their turbulent Neapolitan backgrounds and assert themselves as free spirits and writers in the wider world. Asta in Italian can mean “pole,” and il salto (“jump”) con l’asta is the pole vault. But the plural aste can also refer to the uprights of the letters of the alphabet: the boys would make their great leap through a skillful use of language. Almost four decades later in his new novel, The Old Man by the Sea, a writer, like Starnone in his eighties, looks back across a life in which he always preferred distance and control rather than passion, a control largely associated with his profession of seeking to find “the right words that give meaning to all the pointless things that happen to us while we’re alive.”
Between these early and late works, with their shared attention to the relations among writing, language, and perceived reality, Starnone has enjoyed one of the most prolific careers in contemporary Italian literature. He has published a score of novels as well as stories and nonfiction and writes regularly for cinema, television, and the theater. (Some stylistic and narratological studies—the most important by the distinguished linguist Michele Cortelazzo—have also claimed he is the author behind the pseudonym Elena Ferrante.)
Yet his publishing career began relatively late. Born in Naples in 1943, the son of a seamstress and a railway employee who was also an accomplished and ambitious painter, Starnone began his working life as a schoolteacher. School is the crucible where raw vitality encounters the collective will to impose order and control but also to bring cultural richness to lives that might otherwise remain inhibited and crude. The tension between those two impulses, and in particular the anxiety that education (and indeed literature) might be as much a flight from life as an enhancement of it, is a repeated theme in Starnone’s work. In The Old Man by the Sea an ex-teacher confesses that he used to teach “history, geography, when people were born, when they died, all sorts of terrible things,” but he couldn’t “handle thinking seriously” for himself. Glossing other people’s words brought a sense of security but wouldn’t help children confront life’s horrors.
In the mid-1980s Starnone began to write regularly about school for the left-wing newspaper Il Manifesto, a collaboration that led to short stories about school life and then the early novels, but it was his fictionalized family biography, The House on Via Gemito (2000), that established him as a prominent literary figure and won Italy’s foremost literary prize, the Strega.* At the core of this remarkable book is the triangular relationship between a father, a mother, and their eldest son. The father, frustrated, charismatic, vulgar, and vainglorious, terrifies and enthralls the young Mimí, who would do anything to help him realize his artistic ambitions and poses for long painful hours on his knees for the painting The Drinkers, which appears on the book’s cover. The mother, aside from her fervent devotion to Saint Cyrus, is sublimely practical, making fine clothes for others and above all for herself. She likes to dress up and show herself off, something that drives the highly sexed father wild with jealousy.
The narration returns obsessively to the moments of violence between the parents, which horrify the boy. He both admires and loathes his father and simply adores his mother, but he also fears her flamboyant side, fears, as his father does, that she might betray and abandon them. Her early death, after an illness that the father initially contrives to ignore then notices just in time to capture her desperation in a fine sketch, leaves Mimí utterly disoriented, yearning only to achieve a level of self-control and detachment that will spare him their tumultuous struggle. At the same time he remains fatally drawn to their energy, intensely aware that they did indeed love each other. Starnone dedicated The House on Via Gemito to his mother, and it’s evident that much of his writing involves a struggle to reconcile male sexuality with the kind of respect for women that his mother didn’t get.
In a review of Starnone’s novel Trust (2019), the Italian critic Marco Belpoliti notes that the works of the writer’s mature period—Ties (2014), Trick (2016), and Trust—contain many echoes of The House on Via Gemito and observes that it is “the book from which all the author’s later stories spring and toward which they all collapse as if drawn by a black hole.” A series of alter ego protagonists—writers, artists, intellectuals—of steadily increasing ages seek and generally fail to find some stable identity through their relationships with lovers and wives, oscillating between passionate liaisons with dynamic, independent, even revolutionary women and longer, fruitful marriages with more demure, practical partners—marriages marred, however, by the husbands’ restlessness, alienation, and immersion, as writers, in a world of words that risks becoming pure fantasy or that draws them to betrayal. Starnone invests extraordinary energy and talent in evoking these women, always sympathetically, granting them a coherence and clarity that his male protagonists lack in everything but their dogged work of invention, which is frequently disparaged as essentially lying.
In The Old Man by the Sea (the reference to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is obvious), one wonders how Starnone can continue to develop such an approach with a protagonist in his eighties. The novelist Nicola (Nico) Gamurra is taking a solitary October vacation by the sea and is reading not Hemingway’s novel but Victor Hugo’s The Toilers of the Sea. Both books describe life-and-death encounters with marine creatures, dramas in which the protagonists win the battle only, as it were, to lose the war. Hemingway’s Santiago catches his huge marlin but fails to get it to market when it is eaten by sharks; Hugo’s Gilliat kills the giant octopus that had threatened shipping off the island of Guernsey but is not rewarded as promised with the hand of the woman he loves. None of this could be further from the humdrum routine of Starnone’s affable, ailing octogenarian scribbling in his notebook (merely out of habit, he tells us) on a deck chair beside a becalmed Mediterranean in unusually hot fall weather.
Nicola Gamurra, Starnone aficionados may remember, is the name of the young author in Labilità (2005) who achieves success with a style that flagrantly imitates the worst elements of the writer narrator’s own while remaining entirely untroubled by the need to accommodate fiction to reality. In The Old Man by the Sea, when Evelina, a sixtyish woman walking on the seashore, supposes Nico is a judge she has seen on TV, he chooses not to disappoint her. “Judge on the Court of Appeals,” he elaborates. “I’ve been lying and inventing my whole life,” he later admits. An air of wry mockery hangs over all Starnone’s writing. In a recent story in The New Yorker, “Tortoiseshell,” the narrator confesses to the enormous pleasure he has always taken in telling lies: they “fell from my lips not because I chose to tell them but because, while I was telling them, my understanding that they were lies faded, and they suddenly rang true.”
Even before the conversation with Evelina, something happens that beggars belief. Walking through the dunes to the beach, Nico sees “a small figure outlined in gold: it wasn’t a body, a whirlwind of dust, or a flash of light, but a presence, and it ran past me down the steps and burrowed into the sand.” He’s not surprised; these apparitions aren’t new to him (or to other Starnone protagonists). When the “sparkling gold figurine” reappears “by the water’s edge,” he tries to follow, stumbling on the sand, as it “flitted off into the morning fog, towards the dark stripe of the pier, towards a young woman and a boy.” Back on his deck chair, he recalls how one of his ex-wives referred to such apparitions as “the crazies: you’ve got the crazies,” and he wonders whether “the word figurine is merely a palliative against fear.” The sea may be calm, but it is a powerful memento mori: “funereal” lines of insects are washed away; tiny corpses of anchovies glisten and shimmer on the sand much like the fugitive figurine. The moribund writer needs distraction.
Evelina, always eager to stop by Nico’s deck chair and talk about her unhappy marriage, owns a boutique in the small seaside town. Nico is excited. His mother briefly owned a boutique in 1954, “but she made more clothes for herself than for her clients…. Even when she had to go out to buy bread or fruit, she’d walk out of our low-income building looking like a rich movie actress.” (In this she resembles the mother in The House on Via Gemito, who is called Rusinè, pet name for Rosa.) Seeing a girl—“she must be twenty or so”—launching a canoe into the sea, Nico imagines her as Rosa: “For decades now, I’ve been conjuring up my mother and putting her in places where she is not and could never be.”
Attracted to the girl, Nico decides he wants to “learn the language of canoeing” and visits a sports store near the pier where a handsome salesman tries to schmooze him into buying a kayak. When the girl walks past, nodding at the salesman, Nico hurries out to follow her. Now he imagines he is his father when he first saw and followed his mother: “I carry so much of my father in my body that now I’m following you, with roughly sixty years difference between us, let’s see what I can make happen.” The girl, Lu, stops to open a women’s clothing store where she’s the sales assistant. Nico enters. He wants to buy a dress, he says, and selecting something “green with tiny yellow flowers,” asks her to try it on. It’s for “my mother,” he incongruously announces. When Lu refuses, he buys the dress anyway but leaves the store without it. “It’s for your trouble,” he tells the girl.
Everything, the reader may feel, fits too neatly, or not at all. The store is Evelina’s boutique. Lu appears to be the young woman with the boy to whom the shimmering figurine of the opening pages led Nico, for she has a son, Niní, who is “seven, maybe eight years old.” How, then, can she be only twenty? Meeting Niní on the beach, Nico excites the boy with stories of marine monsters—he knows a man named Gilliat, he says, who killed a giant squid—and Lu objects, repeating the concern of any number of women in Starnone’s novels that she wants the boy to keep his feet on the ground, not to dream of killing monsters.
The sleazy salesman in the sports store, Silvestro, turns out to be Evelina’s cheating husband, a man who could sell you “his own mother.” Actually his mother is dead, but “he could peddle you a story that she’s alive.” This is something Nico himself has done. A man who passes Nico on the beach, scanning the sand with a metal detector, is the regretful ex-teacher and also Lu’s ex-husband, Maurizio. Sometimes he is seen with Niní, who calls him father, to which Maurizio responds, twice, “I’m not your father.” Who is, then? The book assumes the curious form of a detective story in which Nico/Starnone is at once author, detective, and, perhaps, criminal. Told by a friend of Evelina’s that Niní is the spitting image of his father, as long as you know who the father is, Nico answers, “It’s me.” Then he qualifies: “Niní looks just like I did when I was seven years old and deeply unhappy.”
Though the boy and his putative fathers are important for the distractions of plot, Starnone’s focus is always on the women. A long dream is recounted in which Nico “looked down with compassion at bodies of women that the sea had washed up on the beach.” Those still alive revive themselves by pulling up plants from the dunes and eating them. Nico does the same, and “when I woke up I was a woman.” The following day, on the beach, Lu, wearing the dress he has given her, reluctantly relays an invitation from Evelina to join her at the boutique, where a few of her friends will be choosing their autumn clothes. When Lu casually changes out of her bikini under a towel, Nico thinks, “If my mother ever did something like that…around other men, even old men like myself, my father would have killed her.” Reflecting on his difficulty seeing his mother for what she was rather than as the creature of his father’s jealous imagination, he decides, “If Rosa is like Lu…let’s see if I can manage to get beyond like and actually encounter her.”
The opportunity to attempt this comes at the boutique. Trying on clothes together with “much complimenting, yearning, competing, and envy,” four older women, friends of Evelina’s—Dr. Martano, Irmtraud, Melania, and Sibilla—present themselves
as if they were childless widows or single women who’d managed to avoid both long relationships and pregnancies. But it seemed more probable to me that they considered any men they had bent to their demands as irrelevant, and children a concern that they preferred to set to one side.
Sitting on a sofa, notebook in hand, Nico doesn’t “miss a single fluttering eyelash,” reveling in the women’s competitive intimacy as they parade all kinds of clothes around the mirror, “the palms of their right hands extended, as if offering something on a tray.” Everything about the women, he decides, is “lovely,” and likewise the entire vocabulary of fashion—“taffeta, bordeaux-colored shantung silk, lace tulle, royal blue synthetic satin”—which he learned as a child from his mother and later memorized “so as not to lose sight of her.” Watching the much younger Lu, playing the servile role his mother once played, on her knees, pinning up a hem, he recognizes “suddenly, and with acute violence…the smell of life in all that dressing and undressing.” And his mother appears, not as the flamboyant young woman he has been hoping to rediscover but “the way she was two days before she died, when she got dressed with utmost care and asked to be taken to the holy sanctuary in Portici to thank Saint Cyrus for healing her.” Nico watches appalled as, “on the verge of dying, she kneels down in front of Evelina’s clients…reaches out a slender arm,…delicately takes some pins from Lu’s tight-lipped mouth, and…fastens the excess fabric of an oversize dress.”
Just when the shopping spree seems over, Silvestro arrives. Some ten years younger than his wife, this coarse, jovial man immediately and to Nico’s fascinated dismay commands the attention of the women with a barrage of innuendo that has Nico wondering if they aren’t all his lovers. Silvestro is exactly the kind of predatory womanizer his father feared and immediately perceived as a rival. In a move designed to deflate them all, Nico announces he wants to buy some clothes for a granddaughter and asks Lu to try them on, compelling the older women to watch the younger girl model one dress after another, which she does with increasing panache. “She had taken off her bra,” Nico marvels at one point, and he slips into a register that might be that of the older women’s irritation, or his father’s jealousy: “She had refreshed her eye makeup, the bitch.” Refusing “to stay in her place,” Lu “had taken possession of their costly fantasies and was flaunting them indiscriminately.” As the girl tries on “backless dresses, gowns with plunging necklines…skirts and shirts, blouses and sweaters, flared trousers and pegged ones, blazers and cardigans,” Nico seeks to “extract a living, quickened mother out of the body of Lu,” but also, the reader understands, to get his revenge on the others, who had written him off as an “old fool.”
All kinds of plot complications will be spun from this playfully lush episode, leading the novel to a dramatic close, but essentially Starnone’s vision is all here, in the elaborate interplay of word and object, of life as given and life as made up, and above all in the difficulty of drawing any line between creativity and denial, manipulation, pathos, rivalry. Nico emerges as a Prospero figure, conjuring and controlling the world around him, but also as a pathetic character, not unlike the protagonist of Elsa Morante’s last novel, Aracoeli (1982), who sets out in mature life on a journey to conjure up a glimpse of his long-dead mother. (Ferrante has cited Morante as one of her chief inspirations.) “To become a devotee and disciple of deception!” says the narrator of Morante’s Lies and Sorcery (1948). “To fix your every thought and all your knowledge on lies!…Such was my existence!” Curiously, two of Morante’s four novels are narrated in the first person by a man; she had always wanted to be a boy, she claimed. The protagonist of Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child (2014) refers to herself as a writer “invented by men, colonized by their imagination.”
Kayaking together with Lu, she behind him, her arms around his waist, hands gripping his on the paddle, Nico imagines their bodies fusing to form a bizarre composite sea monster:
This—I thought to myself—is how my mother must have been. But I never saw her like this, my father never saw her like this, maybe no one ever saw her like this, and so, never seeing herself reflected in others, maybe my mother never saw herself for who she truly was.
Fluently and efficiently translated, like The House on Via Gemito, by Oonagh Stransky, The Old Man by the Sea reads like a wry, elegiac addition to the earlier masterpiece.
English (US) · 