Domenico Starnone on Old Age, Ambition and the Literary Game

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‘Are you working on a book now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Here, at the beach?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s a summary of everything I haven’t been able to write well.’
‘What does writing well even mean?’
‘Finding the right words that give meaning to all the pointless things that happen to us while we’re alive.’

– The Old Man by the Sea, Domenico Starnone (trans. Oonagh Stransky)

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The narrator of The Old Man by the Sea is in his eighties. He’s irritated by his body, his sleep schedule, his increasing inability to write, or to write well. To him, old age is merely ‘a balcony from which one had a view on meaninglessness’. Is that a view you share? Is there nothing to the adage ‘with age comes wisdom’?

It’s a phrase that belongs to a world in which old age was a well of experience and a valuable record of the past. But that world is long gone. And anyway, even then old people were known for their irrationality far more than their wisdom. Denying their physical deterioration, and their anything-but-serene acceptance of death, went hand in hand with a clinging to power (both big and small), an aversion to generational change, an urgent desire to turn back the clock of history – or at least stop it – and the pitiful imitation of youthful behaviour in old age.

Reading the novel, it feels as if you’ve gathered together questions you’ve been asking throughout your whole career. While you were writing it, did this book feel cumulative, or like a conclusion? Do you see your books as connected in this way?

As far as I’m concerned, every novel strives to take stock, only to discover that the sum is wrong and needs to be recalculated. No book is definitive – something, often the essential thing, is always left out.

Your novels often insist that writing fails, this one especially. What is it about writing and literature that keeps you returning to them, while recognising their shortcomings as a form of expression?

There is a short story by Henry James that is of great interest to me, called ‘The Middle Years’. The protagonist is a writer, and he is seriously ill. He realises that he is talented, but that his talent keeps coming up against the same obstacles. He would like to stay alive long enough for one final attempt that might carry him past those obstacles. For me, that is what writing is: placing the obstacles at the centre and telling the story of the failures and attempts to overcome them.

This is, in many ways, a book for those who write. There are lots of reflections on the writing process, the act of choosing the right word. The narrator speaks about reading the work of other writers and becoming an ‘imitator of imitators’ in his early attempts. Is imitation a useful exercise for writers, maybe especially emerging ones?

Writing is a narrative subject like any other. Just as writing about mines doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making a book for miners, in the same way writing about writing doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making a book for writers. The theme of imitation, too, is not only for writers. Every human being grows by imitating; we have an absolute need for models. The turning point comes with competence. When we have sufficiently absorbed the rules of the literary game, we may feel the need to bend or break them in order to express ourselves. Naturally, if we have chosen unattainable models, our little efforts will seem like mere scribbles. But they will be our scribbles, and that is what counts.

It is also quite an intertextual book. There’s Hemingway, of course, but also Victor Hugo, Thomas Mann, Proust, Musil, Kafka, Svevo and Giorgio Caproni. Are these your own influences? If not, who are some of the writers you’re still returning to now?

Some are: Musil, Kafka, above all Svevo. But I owe a lot to writers who I read in the first half of the 1960s: Calvino, Meneghello, Ginzburg.

The narrator speaks very movingly about abandoning the dream of writing a masterpiece when he was young and making peace with what he calls his own mediocrity. Yet the novels themselves suggest that paying close attention to ordinary life is perhaps the greater ambition. Has your idea of literary ambition changed with time? 

I still like young people with big ambitions. I appreciate them all the more if they are both extraordinarily shy and extraordinarily presumptuous, because I recognise myself in them. I don’t like, however, those who carry these traits with them into old age. I prefer those who have learnt that the books that really matter are very few, and admit, in a self-deprecating way, that they were not the ones to write them.

One thing I noticed across several of your novels is that they seem to begin as attempts to write about one person but gradually become books about someone else. The narrator of The House on Via Gemito wants to preserve the character of his mother but ends up being overwhelmed by his father. The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan begins with the titular girl and instead becomes a book about the narrator’s grandmother. And The Old Man by the Sea resurrects the narrator’s mother through the figure of Lu. How much do you, or can you, plan your subjects, and how much do the subjects take on a life of their own?

The effect you speak of is more or less planned. I called one of my books La retta via [The Straight Path], yet its eight stories are all about the urge to take side routes. Of course, the side routes only work narratively if the reader doesn’t have any reason to regret leaving the path they had been set on. So while the beginning must be accurately mapped out and crafted, the side route should be surprising and interesting, most of all for me, the writer.

Caproni’s beautiful line, tu sai cosa darei / se la incontrassi per strada, is quoted in the text. How do you feel about novels as elegies, as a form of immortality for our loved ones? How is that integrated into a book that distrusts writing’s capacity to be accurate?

Literature does not bring back the people we have loved. Literary immortality has nothing to do with the real life and real death of real people. We create our fictions, we feed on these fictions, and it is the imagination that matters. The literary result can be excellent within the fiction – our imagination did a great job – and yet, in reality, especially in the eyes of its writer, it can turn out to be a failure. With some exaggeration – but of course exaggerations are useful for understanding ourselves – you could say that fiction works all the better when reality doesn’t upset the narrative with its lack of logic and incoherence.

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Domenico Starnone is the author of fifteen works of fiction, including Ties, a New York Times Editors’ Pick and a Sunday Times Best Book of the Year; and Trick, a Finalist for the 2018 National Book Award and the 2019 PEN Translation Prize; and Trust. The House on Via Gemito won Italy’s prestigious literary prize, the Strega, and was longlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize.

Zadie Loft is a London-based writer. Her work has been published in La Piccioletta Barca and Literary Review.