An 82-year-old man with cataracts and a limp is bound to be in a wistful mood. Such is the case with Nico Gamurra, the narrator of The Old Man by the Sea, a bittersweet novel by Domenico Starnone (Ties; Trick; Trust), translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky. Yes, the title is a reference to The Old Man and the Sea; except for a young boy Nico befriends, the stories diverge, with Starnone's achievement focused on its protagonist's reminiscences. For the past 13 days, Nico, a Neapolitan author with four children, six grandchildren, and spouses he abandoned, is renting a house by the dunes south of Rome. When he isn't walking the beach, he laments the difficulties of his writing career--"by the age of twenty, every single sentence I wrote felt like an immense burden and struggle"--and remembers his dressmaker mother, a woman so refined she'd wear her own creations and "walk out of our low-income building looking like a rich movie actress."
Precipitating his beautifully rendered memories are the people he meets at the seaside town, primarily a 24-year-old shop clerk named Lu. When he sees Lu paddling her canoe, he realizes "she's more or less the same age my mother was when my father fell in love with her." Nico's other encounters include the 60-ish owner of a high-end boutique and her husband, and other denizens. "When does desire end?" Lu asks Nico late in the book. That question imbues every element of this magnificent work. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer