“Reality and projection meld to intriguing effect in the Italian writer Domenico Starnone’s The Old Man by the Sea… Invitingly translated by Oonagh Stransky, this short novel self-consciously riffs on The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway's 1952 classic about a fisherman who wages mortal combat with a giant marlin. Nico's heroic adventures are largely inventions of his mind, and by sustained acts of magical thinking he attempts to bring them into being. Mr. Starnone creates a tantalizingly unreliable narration from these layers of artifice, and the book's mood can change from pathetic to sinister in a moment.”
Read the full review in the Wall Street Journal.
