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 …