Review by Booklist Review
This striking novel translated from Italian follows Nicola, a Neapolitan writer in his eighties, your quintessential old soul writer type, spending his mornings writing while living in a seaside town. He spends a great deal of time observing Lu, a local shopgirl. His writerly ways draw him into an introspective desire as he gets to know Lu and her life. He reflects on his relationship with his mother and other influential women in his past, including children, grandchildren, and multiple exes. There is serenity in the landscape and the dreamy translation. The brevity of the book makes every action that much more powerful. It is a meditation on desire, but also on art. Nicola is an obsessive observer as his vocation demands, perhaps to the point of overwhelming him. He can become lost in the details and the romanticism. Nicola represents so many proto literary elders and there are many lessons to be learned. A great book for anyone who enjoys a classic seaside parable and the romance of the Italian language.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this smoldering mood piece from Starnone (The House on Via Gemito), an 82-year-old accomplished author persists in his life's work despite his physical and mental decline. Nico, who has come to the Italian seaside to die, fills a notebook with every passing observation. In the meantime, he lingers at the water's edge, spying on locals as he combs the beach with a metal detector or teaches himself to kayak. He takes special interest in a much younger shop assistant named Lu, and buys her gifts. Secondary characters such as oafish shop-owner Silvestro, would-be-writer Gino, and philosophical crank Maurizio take the gestures as Nico's show of chivalry. In fact, Nico is drawn to Lu because she reminds him of his mother, whose memory he hopes to reconstruct, having come to believe that words and stories "train the brain not to be satisfied with appearances." Eventually, Nico's fanciful imagination propels the story from its placid surface to dark waters. The turn is foreshadowed by Silvestro, who, annoyed at Nico for charming his beautiful and unsatisfied wife, claims there's a "serpent lurking deep inside" him. The result is an evocative glimpse into a man's inner world. (Aug.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An old man reflects on his life, his mother, the women he's loved. If Starnone's latest work to appear in English bears certain parallels to a Hemingway novella with a strikingly similar title, that's intentional--right down to the narrator's casual remarks to a young boy about the sea monster just out of sight. Starnone's narrator, Nicola, is an 82-year-old storyteller quietly passing time in a seaside town south of Rome. He sits by the beach, reads, writes, and observes the few townspeople who pass by. "Old age," he thinks, "offered an even better view on meaninglessness." If, at least at first, there is a certain tepidity to Nicola (who appears to bear certain similarities to Starnone himself), he is soon roused to a quiet simmering. Lu, a young woman who works in a clothing boutique, inexplicably reminds him of his mother, herself once a dressmaker. Nicola is prompted to reflect not only on his childhood--his life as a whole--but also on the way that he has deliberately constructed that life for himself with the only material available: language. In Starnone's hands, this book is as much about the futility of writing as it is about anything else. Nicola comments on his own narration--often unimpressed--as he proceeds. "What an incongruous simile," he thinks, after comparing anchovies swimming with the current to ice. "I just don't know how to do it anymore, maybe I never did." Throughout the book (beautifully translated by Stransky), Starnone's sensitivity, nuance, and subtlety are wonderful to behold--but he doesn't seem to take himself too seriously, either. Page after page is imbued, alongside everything else, with an achingly sweet humor. A deceptively simple work and an exquisite addition to Starnone's oeuvre. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
