Edoardo Albinati, The Catholic School: A Novel, Antony Shugaar, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.
excerpt
read it at Google Books
A semiautobiographical coming-of-age story, framed by the harrowing 1975 Circeo massacre
Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School, the winner of Italy’s most prestigious award, The Strega Prize, is a powerful investigation of the heart and soul of contemporary Italy.
Three well-off young men―former students at Rome’s prestigious all-boys Catholic high school San Leone Magno―brutally tortured, raped, and murdered two young women in 1975. The event, which came to be known as the Circeo massacre, shocked and captivated the country, exposing the violence and dark underbelly of the upper middle class at a moment when the traditional structures of family and religion were seen as under threat.
It is this environment, the halls of San Leone Magno in the late 1960s and the 1970s, that Edoardo Albinati takes as his subject. His experience at the school, reflections on his adolescence, and thoughts on the forces that produced contemporary Italy are painstakingly and thoughtfully rendered, producing a remarkable blend of memoir, coming-of-age novel, and true-crime story. Along with indelible portraits of his teachers and fellow classmates―the charming Arbus, the literature teacher Cosmos, and his only Fascist friend, Max―Albinati also gives us his nuanced reflections on the legacy of abuse, the Italian bourgeoisie, and the relationship between sex, violence, and masculinity.
Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School creates a world: a world of power, sex, violence and the threat of masculinity, of the power wielded and misused by men.
‘To be born male is an incurable disease’
In 1975, three young well-off men, former students at Rome’s prestigious all-boys Catholic high school San Leone Magno, brutally torture, rape, and murder two young women. The event, which comes to be known as the Circeo massacre, shocks and captivates all of Italy, exposing the violence and dark underbelly of the upper middle class at a moment when the traditional structures of family and religion are under threat.
Edoardo Albinati sets his novel in the halls and corridors of San Leone Magno in the late 1960s and the 1970s, exploring the intersection between the world of teenage boys and the structures of power in modern Italy. Along with indelible portraits of teachers and pupils – the charming Arbus, the literature teacher Cosmos, and his only Fascist friend, Max – Albinati’s novel also reflects on the legacy of abuse, the Italian bourgeoisie, and the relationship between sex, violence, and masculinity.
The Catholic School is one of the foundational works of the literature of the twenty-first century. It is a great book by a great writer. It is also a major sociological and theological meditation, which raises questions that we hope won’t be forgotten.” —Natale Benazzi
Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School is one of the most arresting and haunting works of European literature to have appeared in the twenty-first century. Widely acclaimed when it was first published in 2016 and the winner of Italy’s most prestigious literary award, the Strega Prize, Albinati’s hypnotic memoir/novel brings alive the conflicts and contradictions inherent in contemporary Italian society and explores the violence, fear, and love of death that exist at its core. In its courage, clear-sightedness, and narrative power, Albinati’s book bears comparison with Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, the Neapolitan novels of Elena Ferrante, and the Outline Trilogy of Rachel Cusk—works that challenge the conventions of traditional fiction and open new avenues of cultural and psychological exploration that are altering the way we experience and understand the world. Albinati himself has written:
The Catholic School is based on events that actually happened, events to which in part I was a direct eyewitness. Working from those actual events, I’ve intertwined episodes and characters with varying percentages of fiction; I freely interbred memory and imagination. In reporting on the crimes in question, I made use of police reports, transcripts of depositions, wiretaps, interviews, and legal verdicts concerning the protagonists, cutting and stitching where I thought necessary. This book makes no claim to accurate historical reconstruction or to proposing an alternative version of events . . . The contents of human life and human lives is what literature shapes for its own specific purposes, and it tends not to be over-tender in its treatment.
The contents of human life and human lives is what literature shapes for its own specific purposes, and it tends not to be over-tender in its treatment.
The school of Albinati’s title is the Istituto San Leone Magno, named after the great fifth-century pope who turned Attila the Hun away from Rome. SLM, as Albinati calls it, is an elite private institution run by the Marist Brothers that is located in the comfortable, leafy Quartiere Trieste, or QT, a neighborhood that is home to Rome’s upper middle-class establishment. Albinati, who grew up in the QT, is himself an alumnus of SLM, and his book carefully recounts his own family story as a representative part of his investigation. By extension, though, “the Catholic school” stands for an entire system of education (or, one might say, miseducation) that has traditionally prepared its students to play a part in the long-standing compromised moral order of postwar Italian society.
Among the other graduates of SLM were three young neo-Fascists, Andrea Ghira, Angelo Izzo, and Gianni Guido, likewise children of privileged QT families, who committed one of the most infamous crimes of the seventies, during the notorious anni di piombo, or years of lead, when Italy was torn apart by left- and right-wing political violence. On the surface, the Circeo massacre had no political significance. It was perpetrated on September 29–30, 1975, at the Ghira family villa in a seaside resort on the Circeo Peninsula, sixty miles south of Rome. The three men charged were eventually sentenced to life in prison for raping and torturing two teenage girls, Rosaria Lopez and Donatella Santi. Lopez was killed and Santi only escaped by pretending to be dead.
These two subjects—the crime the killers committed and the institution that produced them—are the poles around which Albinati’s mesmerizing, meandering auto-fictional narrative, part memoir, part history, part philosophical meditation, oscillates.
As Albinati’s fellow novelist Francesco Pacifico has written, The Catholic School, which is delivered in “today’s most distinguished Italian narrative style, is a moving, though far from melancholy epitaph for the Roman bourgeoisie . . . Albinati’s language is a new Italian grammar; it’s always clear, but with no need to glitter . . . There are three ways to read it: all at once; as an encyclopedia (i.e., delving into it here and there); or dividing it into four different books.”
The first book, about the school of San Leone Magno, is “a study in the contradictions between privilege and evangelical poverty—educating the ruling class while trying to stay removed from an era in which the boundaries of the known and the licit” are being constantly tested.
The second is a story of “young fascists and virginity, of tormented intellectual friendships and the mystery of woman. In the seventies, boys and girls still grew up separately; women were the source of sexual initiation, but unfamiliar and inimical.”
Albinati’s profound explorations of male sexuality and rape culture, of ingrained masculinist attitudes and their political dimensions and the enduring Italian attraction to fascism, are brilliant and disturbing.
The third book is about the Circeo massacre, which took place in an election year, when a Communist victory seemed possible. The three SLM alumni bring two lower-class virgins to a villa by the sea, rape them, and leave them in the trunk of a car—one dead, the other still alive. For Albinati, writes Pacifico, the crime of the Circeo is a natural outgrowth of the culture in which its perpetrators were raised; it “belongs to the Quartiere Trieste the way Nazism belongs to Germany.”
The fourth book, finally, “is the book of the bourgeoisie. Here are pages on the quiet life, walks before dinner, the fear of disorder . . . where the families of state employees live, rich “in a sober and mysterious way,” and children, like Albinati himself, abandon their parents’ material success to become artists.
Pacifico compares The Catholic School to Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, to the philosophizing parts of War and Peace, and calls it “a book that’s neither traditional nor experimental. It moves forward, ticking like time . . . thrilling us here, boring us there, like a natural thing.” It’s no surprise that it took the author more than a decade “to record the life and times of the bourgeoisie before it died.”
Natale Benazzi, in his introduction to the Italian paperback edition, points out that “great narratives are always labyrinths,” and Albinati himself knows this perfectly. As Benazzi puts it:
Every novel always is the narration of an unhappiness. Even when the author joyfully lays claim to the fullness, the exuberance, of life, or proclaims its aridity, invariably and in every case he is narrating his unhappiness about something that went away after being there, or else something he waited for in vain, or that passed close by, very close, even too close . . . but he didn’t move fast enough to seize it. I, for example—I partly remember the time in which this story unfolds, I partly studied it or heard other people talk about it, I dream of it a great deal, to an even greater extent, I invent it depending on what the story requires: it’s a snake in the grass that you glimpse for a fleeting instant, and there is more of a sensation of having seen it, relived it in a shiver that runs down my spine, than a clear sighting of it before my eyes.
“In this labyrinth or mosaic,” Benazzi writes,
every image has its own precise reason and the reader will choose what convinces him best, as he becomes fascinated by the book and the question . . . around which everything revolves: How is it possible that Catholic education and bourgeois morality (religiously, socially, and economically the high points of Western consciousness in the last centuries) could lead, not to the brutal idiocy of the crime, but to a social awareness so focused on itself that it fails to comprehend the consequences of its own morality?
The Catholic School, Benazzi notes, is
a literary text of great value . . . moral without ever being moralistic. The author writes about sex, about men and women, about ersatz masculinity and dreamed-of femininity; about power and submission; about ignorance; about the roots of bullying; money; the propensity for crime; the distance between rich and poor and the resemblance between the two; about the universal schizophrenia in which everyone is both Cain and Abel at the same time and the evil in us tends to destroy the good. Before the violent insanity of attacking someone else there comes self-murder. Only when evil is allowed to prevail within us does everything become possible, plausible, realizable. When we’ve murdered the Abel inside ourselves, who can stop us from killing him “outside,” too?
Then there is the theme of forgiveness and memory, of the possibility of forgetting the evil that has been done to us, and, on the other hand, the need to remember . . .
- https://fsgworkinprogress.com/2019/01/31/the-catholic-school/
An important, at times magnificent book . . . An entirely original narrative . . . A pivotal moment in contemporary literature. -
Corriere della Sera
In The Catholic School a thousand doors open on a thousand different themes . . . A powerful, multifaceted, acute, extreme book. - La Repubblica
The Catholic School is entirely unique: it meanders, it is merciless, it is very precise and yet lyrical, thoughtful and fiery, depressing and funny. In short, it is one of the best books I have read in recent years. -
De Morgen
“Reading some books feels aspirational, the attainment of an ideal, rather than an immediately realistic undertaking. It’s with this in mind that we recommend
The Catholic School . . . Painstakingly researched and semi-autobiographical, the novel is based on a brutal real-life crime: the rape, torture, and murder of two young women by three men in 1975. The novel is part true crime, part coming of age, and explores sex, violence, and masculinity in contemporary Italy.” ―
The A.V. Club
“[Albinati’s] scrutiny of the infamous ‘Circeo massacre’ . . . yields an intense and intimate disquisition on masculinity, violence, and social class in 1970s Rome . . . The real focus of Albinati’s ‘obsessive inquest’ are the psychosexual impulses and socioeconomic forces behind the incidents, and the gnawing possibility that their root causes might be more than upper-class ennui and entitlement, something even uglier and essential to human nature . . . [
The Catholic School] is a knot of interlocking philosophical concerns that the author has spent a lifetime trying to untangle. Dense, sprawling, brilliant, like Rome itself.”
―Brendan Driscoll, Booklist
“A vast, philosophically charged novel of education, faith, and crime . . . A little goes a long way, and there’s a lot of it.”
―Kirkus Reviews
Albinati examines radical politics, religious poetry, and Hellenic philosophy, his country’s long dalliance with fascism, and even Alfred Hitchcock in an exhaustive manner that winds up bordering on extreme navel-gazing. Albinati’s centerpiece is the real-life murder and rape of two women by his near-peers at the all-boys school of San Leone Magno in 1975. To make sense of the crimes, Albinati revisits every aspect of his education and its aftermath, often in digressive detail, and too often he arrives at bromides (“The real problem with truth is whether or not to speak it”) or, for instance, the etymology of the Italian word for rape, altogether doing little to elucidate the questions of privilege and power that lie at the novel’s heart. Readers meet schoolmates including the precocious athlete Arbus, the vicious Max, and mentor Cosmo, whose unusual knowledge of classical literature provides the young with Edoardo with a path toward a goal in writing and out of the stultifying world of San Leone Magno. Still, this massive work winds up as less a new take on the nonfiction novel than an exercise in indulgence and solipsism. -
Publishers Weekly
A vast, philosophically charged novel of education, faith, and crime by Italian writer Albinati (
Coming Back: Diary of a Mission to Afghanistan, 2004).
At the core of Albinati’s bildungsroman, its narrator a minor writer named Edoardo Albinati (“I’d like it if my reputation as a writer were sufficiently great that I could hope to have a street named after me in my city, just a little, out-of-the-way street”), is a terrible crime: Three alumni of his Catholic all-boys school kidnap, rape, and murder two teenage girls, a real-life 1975 event known in Italy as the Circeo massacre. Albinati mentions the crime early, then builds up to it over hundreds of pages in which he meditates on the ordinary violence of daily life in Rome and the specialized violence that comes from attending parochial school, with its cliques, beatings, and priestly oppression. Albinati’s hero is a pimply, unattractive nerd named Arbus, who, Albinati learns much later, was an intent student of “the different ways of killing people” even though he was mild-tempered and inoffensive in a setting that was "marked by a very particular enthusiasm for violent abuse." Albinati, as both writer and character, ponders the nature of this violence, especially as it is visited upon women (“The positive fact—positive, that is, in the sense of effective, documented—that women suffer violence becomes the very reason they suffer it”); among the other topics are the abuse of authority by authoritarians in the priesthood and in politics as well as the tangled politics of Italy, with some of his classmates communists, others fascists, and Arbus ever the individualist, a “Nazi-Maoist," which is to say, one of the people "who chose the worst…of right-wing and left-wing extremism." Albinati’s musings on the philosophical meanings of rape, murder, education, and other matters are the substance of this book, which, if boiled down to actual deeds, would scarcely add up to a novella. A little goes a long way, and there’s a lot of it.
Talky and pensive; for readers who like their fiction laden with more reflections than deeds. -
Kirkus Reviews
Scrutiny of the infamous “Circeo massacre,” in which former students at a distinguished Catholic all-boys school raped and tortured two young women in a secluded luxury villa, yields an intense and intimate disquisition on masculinity, violence, and social class in 1970s Rome. From the moment the victims (one dead, the other nearly so) were pulled from the trunk of a Fiat in the leafy, affluent Trieste Quarter, the case captivated the Italian public. Recently uncovered details linking the perpetrators to other crimes have again aroused public interest. Prize-winning Albinati, a fellow alumnus, does not shy away from grisly sensationalism. Hints that characters in Albinati’s orbit might overlap with those of the perpetrators, or that the author possesses other insider information, induce the reader to keep pushing through this lengthy novel. But the real focus of Albinati’s “obsessive inquest” are the psychosexual impulses and socioeconomic forces behind the incidents, and the gnawing possibility that their root causes might be more than upper-class ennui and entitlement, something even uglier and essential to human nature. What initially seems to be context or digression—a hundred pages on bourgeois marriage; a hundred pages on rape—emerges as the book’s core, a knot of interlocking philosophical concerns that the author has spent a lifetime trying to untangle. Dense, sprawling, brilliant, like Rome itself.
— Brendan Driscoll
https://www.booklistonline.com/The-Catholic-School-Edoardo-Albinati/pid=9717973
Winner of the Strega prize, Italy’s equivalent of the Booker,
The Catholic School turns on a notorious crime that took place in an Italian seaside town in 1975, when three well-to-do young men from Rome abducted, raped and tortured two teenage girls, killing one, in a case that provoked a wave of horrified soul-searching, not least among the middle classes.
Edoardo Albinati’s novel is a mammoth, roundabout attempt to conjure with the fact that he went to the same boarding school as the perpetrators, analysing – over more than 1,200 pages – the environment that formed them, from the political terrorism of Italy’s “years of lead” (the criminals were neo-fascists) to the post-60s upending of social and sexual norms that left bourgeois families like Albinati’s at sea.
The result resembles a true crime novel as told by
Karl Ove Knausgaard. “What can explain the fact that yesterday I spent at least an hour online searching for photos of a skinny Belgian model with big tits? Why does sexual freedom so closely resemble slavery?” Albinati asks in lines typical of his candid self-portraiture and abstract musing. “Sex is a singular sort of prison whose bars keep you from getting in, rather than getting out,” he writes: “what you want, what you desire is
inside”.
An endnote from Albinati’s translator, Antony Shugaar, suggests the specificity of his cultural references may deter non-Italians. Maybe, but fiction can thrive on detail and
The Catholic School is full of gusty generalisation: its challenge might actually be its lack of specificity. While you can see why Albinati avoids lingering on the criminals at the narrative’s heart, his deliberately anti-novelistic style, lacking any characters or story to speak of, makes it hard to buy his idea that their actions represented some kind of “reprisal in the larger context of a global war” triggered by feminism – an idea that, undramatised, seems little more than a strenuous bid to intellectualise violent misogyny.
This isn’t a normal novel, and nor is the pact it makes with the reader; 900 pages in, Albinati tells “anyone who has had enough” to skip nearly half of what’s left. Ignore that advice and the reward is moot: late passages involve, among other things, a dream Albinati has about taking revenge on dog owners who let their pets foul the pavement and some needy emails from an ex-classmate failing to muster numbers for a school reunion.
Yet, weirdly, it’s in these drifting tides of consciousness, rather than the book’s quasi-anthropological grandstanding, that Albinati’s titanic enterprise ultimately feels most alive, even if what they tend to reveal – men think about sex; sometimes it’s ugly – isn’t exactly news. -
Anthony Cummins
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/25/catholic-school-edoardo-albinati-review
After having read “Doctor Faustus” by Thomas Mann, a real masterpiece, I wanted to approach some Italian literature, something shorter and different. “The Catholic School” was advised to me, and so I got the Kindle version of it. The dotted line told me promptly the approximate length… 1300 pages in the traditional format!
But this novel is based in a specific historical affair (“the Massacre of Circeo”, a true story of rape and murder), the troubled 70s in Italy and specifically in Rome, in a specific area I know quite well: Trieste Area. This novel is about what neo-fascism was in Italian Republic. It was presented to me by my friend Frescobaldo (a name of fantasy like many in this book) as a novel unveiling some mysteries of those times as the author really was schoolmate of some criminals in a famous denominational “Grammar School”: San Leone Magno (“Great Sacred Lion”).
The number of vignettes this novel made me re-emerge from my personal life are countless (I am 22 years younger by the way), but as a sociologist I’d like to cite three points I deem essential and a total novelty in how the 70s are exposed:
- The real nature of the neo-fascism is here brutally and at the same time analytically dissected. This is a psychological and societal analysis of what neo-fascism was, and unfortunately has continued to be until mid 2000s. It tells the mistakes and why it was difficult to understand overwhelmingly the phenomenon (perhaps until the third point of this list was alive). In few words, neo-fascism has been a desperate trial to find protagonism. Neo-fascism was the acknowledgment that Italy was not coming back nor establishing what Spain, Portugal or Greece were (and were about to stop to be). Neo-fascism also was totally unable to stop the Communist Party, that failed to get political power for other reasons. Neo-fascism was also closer to Nazism than Fascism. The absurd gender education and values transmitted by a dramatically changing Catholic Church made the rest in “mistaking the doses in the pursuit of education”, as the Author affirms. This novel really gives explanations to facts that I was hardly able to give any, as the 70s never ended in the 80s, 90s and 2000s to expand their, although weaker and weaker, cultural waves (I am talking especially to students’ movements).
- Consequentially, The Truth about many mysteries in 70s Italian history is gotten not from a deeper knowledge of conspiracy-like theories and evidence (I confess I like a lot the genre); to understand the truth is more likely to accept that some people – like Angelo Izzo, the most famous of the three monsters of Circeo – have been purposely false informers with the only aim to get attention on them. It was just selfish perverse narcissism. Deeper understating of history comes from deeper understanding of changes in the reproduction of values (what else education is?!). In one word, which I can’t translate with accuracy, a person like Izzo was just a delatore (a would say a kind of “fake informant”).
- The liberal, pro-Enlightenment intellectuals of the 70s, usually from the Left spectrum of Italian politics (mostly Communist of variants of it), are definitively overcome and affectionately explained in their erudite contradictions. The figure of “professor Cosmo” is particularly sound and humane to this regard. I may add that if recently the former leader of the Left Party “Rifondazione Comunista” declared to have found his family in “Comunione e Liberazione” (a very strong Italian conservative Catholic lobby), Albinati was very mild depicting this end of “public Atheism” in Italy. (To this regard, and for the taste of complex plots too, I may say Albinati looks like Sorrentino)
The “Second Vatican Council” and its implementation is at the very root of this socialization dynamic via education, even though interestingly enough it is never mentioned across the book. For those who would define themselves liberal and/or Catholic, this point ought to be of some interest as in my personal experiences in that Area of Rome and in 8 years of Catholic denominational Schools in Florence, I may say that during the Polish Pope epoch those values and spirit have been abandoned and at the same time “adjusted & fixed”.
I found nevertheless a weak point: although I couldn’t get rid of my Kindle until I finished it all, I think the book is a little longer than necessary. It could have said all it tells in much less pages. I, on my behalf, strongly recommend this novel to whoever is interested to understand politics, gender issues and the first cohort of people in the Western world who experienced a structural crisis in Italy. To me, as part of a even greater crisis (the current one) who grew up in the shining 80s, this novel is particularly essential. -
giuliomarini
giuliomarini.wordpress.com/2016/08/30/the-catholic-school-a-novel-by-edoardo-albinati-la-scuola-cattolica/
A very long novel—like Edoardo Albinati’s “
The Catholic School” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)—complicates our sense of what a novel is. A thousand-plus pages, in the range of a million words: such a novel makes “Ulysses” and “The Golden Notebook” and “Gravity’s Rainbow” seem sleek. It resists our efforts to read it on the bus or in bed, to get lost in it, to finish it, as we were taught to do in school; even on an e-reader, it tries our twenty-first-century patience. Very long nonfiction books are typically justified by their subject matter. Not so the very long novel: impractical, gratuitous, it has to justify itself as it goes.
The very long novel is even more gratuitous in Italian than it is in English. Jhumpa Lahiri, introducing a new book of Italian short stories, observes that Italian literature has developed around the story, rather than the novel, which retains the feel of an import. In the shadow of Dante and Boccaccio, Italian literature has no domineering elder of the very long novel: no Cervantes, no Richardson or Fielding, no Dumas or Hugo. Primo Levi’s books are under three hundred pages, as are Italo Calvino’s, as is Giorgio Bassani’s “
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis”; Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s grand novel “
The Leopard” is only a little over.
A very long Italian novel can seem an act of defiance; it is certainly an act of imposition. Albinati’s “The Catholic School,” originally published in 2016, occupies almost thirteen hundred dense pages. It became a best-seller in its native land, and was awarded the Strega Prize (previously given to Bassani, Elsa Morante, Levi,
Natalia Ginzburg, et al.). The English translation, done with unflagging vigor by Antony Shugaar, presents readers with a very long novel that feels even longer than it is. The effect is surely intended. Of the novel’s many forays into ideas, the richest is its exploration of “the gratuitous,”
la gratuità. It’s a mode of experience in which power and the absence of purpose meet; and, in the reading, this gratuitously long novel about religion, manhood, sex, and violence becomes a test of its own unruly philosophy.
Albinati was born in 1956 and was educated at a Catholic boys’ school in the prosperous district of Rome known as the Quartiere Trieste before completing his studies at a state-run, coeducational high school. “That was my time, yes, and these were my spaces,” the narrator, also named Edoardo Albinati, remarks, and the novel is formulated as a work of personal history that will disclose the inner life of contemporary Italy. So the Quartiere Trieste is a “battlemented, turreted citadel” for the ruling class; the Catholic boys’ school an incubator for Italy’s future leaders; and the Catholicism on offer there a distillation of the opiate that has drugged Europe since time began—a mixture of wealth, power, status, and moral scrupulosity, tempered by “a catechism that, on paper at least, preached something like the exact opposite.” The years during which Albinati comes of age are years of epochal change for Italy, for Catholicism, for ideals of manhood. Albinati and his classmates are “a theatrical troupe” who “find themselves acting out the Meaning of Life without yet having lived,” and their school is “a miniature theater or a laboratory, a workshop.”
In Italy, as in the United States, the social convulsions of the sixties and early seventies have been dramatized countless times (as in the affecting 2003 miniseries “
The Best of Youth”). This may be why Albinati, even as he gestures toward a generational saga, focusses tightly on adolescence. He opens with the story of his friend Arbus: pale, frail, skinny, and so bright that he is given “abstruse nicknames” such as the “unmoved mover.” And Albinati intimates that the main concern of the novel will be a crime committed by some classmates of his in September, 1975: a rape and murder that became headline news in Italy the way that the Central Park rape case did in New York in the next decade.
A time, a place, an upbringing, a friendship, all shot through with violence: these elements recall Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels. Similarly, the promise of an unpacking of the sacred and profane mysteries of postmodern manhood calls to mind Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” series (whose sixth volume runs to eleven hundred and sixty pages). You may find yourself anticipating a work that does for Rome in the seventies what Ferrante has done for postwar Naples, and for male friendship what Knausgaard did for fathers and sons. But the anticipation is premature, the comparisons misplaced. The brilliant friend Arbus soon drops out of the text. So do the devices that novelists as different as Ferrante and Knausgaard rely on: characters, dialogue, incident, chronology, and, especially, the rendering of everyday life through precise, detail-flecked paraphrase.
For a few hundred pages, nothing much happens. The most dramatic incident Albinati relates from his school days involves some bullies whipping a weaker boy, as in a rite of flagellation. The rape and murder is treated in a dozen unspectacular pages. Two young men who went to school with Albinati abduct two young women after a double date and take them to a vacation house on Monte Circeo, between Rome and Naples; joined by a third young man, they rape the women, kill one of them, wrap them both in plastic, and stuff them in the
trunk of a car; then they drive to Rome and park the car overnight in the Quartiere Trieste, where the surviving woman, kicking and screaming in the trunk, is heard by a neighbor.
That crime is the novel’s link to the conceit of the gratuitous. In fiction, the gratuitous descends from André Gide’s 1914 novel, “
Les Caves du Vatican,” in which the callow young Frenchman Lafcadio, on a train between Rome and Naples, spots a man he knows slightly and pushes him off the moving train. For Gide and his modernist disciples, the “unmotivated crime,” the gratuitous act, was a challenge to both the European civilization of the Enlightenment and the older Christian civilization, which in their different ways maintained that human behavior is shaped by reason, motive, and purpose. The term “the gratuitous” appropriated Christian claims about God’s grace, freedom, and inscrutability, applying them to human actions in a godless world.
A century later, Albinati has fictionalized the crime his classmates committed and elaborated on it in the language of broad-brush cultural criticism. He calls it “the kind of scandal that disfigures in an indelible fashion the space that it lays open to the glare of daylight,” and goes on to cycle through rhetorical effects in an effort to register its significance. The crime, he writes,
served at the same time as a warning against the evil detected, but also implicitly instigated others to commit the same crime by the force of a negative example, suggesting that by now the world was contaminated and there could be no respite from corruption and violence. Either you were victims or you were perpetrators (the slogan “We are all responsible,” which dates back to distant Catholic roots, has had an incredible popularity in our country, and caused the damages I’ve already discussed: by summoning us all to accept glaring or hidden guilt, at the same time it dilutes that guilt in a sort of generic collective sin, which can be condoned equally collectively), or else both things together, perpetrators and victims, which leads to a sort of general amnesty. Stigmatized in words, the horror became accessible, within reach of one and all. . . .
Innocence was ruined for good. If innocence had ever existed.
That reflection comes three hundred pages after the account of the crime. In the interim, Albinati the author-narrator holds forth on many topics. He ponders “the morality of sacrifice,” the nature of resentment, and the character of the bourgeoisie (such as their tendency “to minimize,” as when his parents would say, “It’s nothing. . . . Let’s drop it. Let’s just forget about it”). He sees the rape and murder on Monte Circeo as “gratuitous” because it was a crime that he feels any of his classmates could have committed—essentially date rape taken to a terrible extreme—and one in which they are, in a sense, collectively complicit. More broadly, he regards this notion of the gratuitous as a key that unlocks the mysteries of contemporary life. For him, as for Surrealists like André Breton, it is an action whose express purpose is to have no purpose. It is often characterized by excess, as in acts of cruelty and torture. Free of “necessity,” it represents “nonconformism” and “abandonment.” The terrorist violence of neo-Fascists in Italy in the nineteen-seventies, for example, was gratuitous, in that it did away with “any need to answer for its deeds” and kept them “uncontaminated by the leprosy of reason.”
As these notions are developed over many pages, it becomes clear that “The Catholic School” is not a social novel about well-born Roman Catholics, and not a work of true crime. It is a very late entry in the long European tradition of the novel as a quasi-philosophical essay in disguise. Here and there, Albinati presses the essayish impulse into different forms: a long sermon by a priest of the school; Arbus’s class notes on Machiavelli’s “The Prince”; a series of pensées supposedly found in a notebook left by a beloved teacher. Mostly, though, he writes as Edoardo Albinati, an author in middle age who is struggling to finish a book. Weary of fiction, he expounds on whatever is on his mind, and the very long novel becomes a succession of slantwise essays about gender, sex, and power. He paraphrases thinkers from Freud to Judith Butler; he flirts with autofiction, making a record of his reflections through several Easters, as the parish priest, following Italian custom, shows up to bless his apartment (divorced, Albinati is back in the old neighborhood) and engages with him on the question of whether and what he believes.
Why is the novel called “The Catholic School”? The title, like so much else in the book, seems arbitrary. Albinati was never a fervent believer, and he stopped going to Mass in his early teens. All the same, Catholicism is a subject he cherishes. For him, as for many fallen-away Catholics, the further he gets from his Catholic upbringing, the more he has to say about it. “To have studied at a school run by priests was an original sin that would have to be scrubbed out,” he reflects early on. In his own life, he sees the influence of his education in a double way. The priests schooled him and his classmates in the practices of “unmasking” bourgeois society: “reversing appearances, overturning fixed hierarchies, overturning the money changers’ tables.” At the same time, they taught the boys how to thrive in a bourgeois society. Thus Catholic school raised them to be inwardly divided, set against themselves—at once desiring and despising worldly things. It taught them, Albinati writes, “to be masochists . . . to redeem our pain and sorrow by discovering in the end that they are pleasurable, to love the wounds of Jesus as if they had been inflicted on our own bodies.”
That is nothing new. Thinkers from Nietzsche onward have found fault with Christianity for exalting submission. What is new is the twist Albinati gives to the legacy of his schooling. As a boy, he says, he had masochism forced on him through the catechism; as a man, he finds that his education lingers, leading him to view its reciprocal, sadism, as the dark heart of society.
Rape, in this schema, is not “something exceptional or pathological” but a symptom of the way things are. Albinati discusses rape philosophically, the way another writer might discuss the role of friendship or physical labor in society: “Rape is the simplified paradigm of relations between the sexes, its energy-saving mode, its substantial diagram, and it lies at the foundation of every relationship, of every act of intercourse, not necessarily brutal ones.” Rape is a quintessential case of the gratuitous, in that it separates the male sexual impulse from every kind of necessity. This may be why Albinati the Catholic-school alumnus is fascinated by it: because rape is a brutal rejection of the traditional Catholic teaching that sexual intercourse is meant for the purpose of procreation in marriage and that all other sex is immoral—gratuitous. Or it may be that he is fascinated because rape, in the terms of the novel, is an unmistakable way for a man to overcome the masochistic habit of self-subjugation he acquired at school by sadistically asserting himself. He declares that the effect of rape is different from that of intercourse per se, for it is connected “with the subjugation of someone else’s will to your own . . . when we are capable of obligating others to do, not what they want to do, but what we want them to do.” He observes, “I can’t be certain that my witticism will make a girl laugh, or that my gaze will fascinate her, but for sure, a slap or a punch will make her cry.” It’s enough to make you wonder whether you missed something—whether the author-narrator took part in the crime on Monte Circeo, and this book is meant to be the diary of a rapist.
Readers sometimes object to “gratuitous sex” or “gratuitous violence,” on the ground that the graphic depiction of these things can reduce complex relationships to carnal fundamentals. Often, that is the effect of the passages about sex in this novel, as Albinati forces the experience of a generation of men through the needle’s eye of his “sadomaso” interpretation. Some of Albinati’s accounts of his own sexual exploits seem so purely gratuitous, in this banal sense, that they undermine the more robust idea of the gratuitous on which his very long novel depends.
All that material is far from Catholic school, and that is the point of it. Henry James, writing, in 1879, about Nathaniel Hawthorne, spelled out some of the possibilities available to an American overshadowed by the “darkening cloud” of original sin that came with the Puritan heritage. Such a person could contrive to live comfortably beneath it, could suffer under it, could try to cast it off, or could “transmute” it into art, as James felt that Hawthorne had done. It may be that the best way to understand “The Catholic School” is as a middle-aged Italian man’s effort to cast off his Catholic upbringing at last. Fifty years after Albinati left Catholic school in Rome, the combination of countercultural religion and bourgeois morality impressed on him there still overshadows his life more than he likes. This novel is his effort to free himself from it—“to get rid of it, not to remember it,” he said after “The Catholic School” won the Strega Prize.
The novel’s unbounded intelligence, its cool take on sexual violence, and its disregard for conventions of character and plot are assertions of the author’s independence from Catholic and bourgeois expectations. So is its extreme length. At the same time, the length suggests how hard it can be for such a man to shed such an upbringing, even in supposedly secular contemporary Italy. He can’t just get rid of it once and for all; he has to assert his freedom from it again and again. -
Paul Elie
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/sex-and-power-in-the-catholic-school
Naked, white-skinned vertebrates with sticky legs, spotty backs, chicken breasts and arms that are too long - that's how the students of the Catholic boys' gymnasium San Leone Magno in Rome present themselves at the pool edge of their swimming pool.
They are fourteen years old and fight with their bodies. Even the most arrogant daredevils will find it difficult to cuddle up and try convincingly not to lose the arrogant accustomed respect of their tadpole movements. The biggest fear: to be considered a girl. "To be born male is an incurable disease," admits the first-person narrator and main hero frankly. The Italian author Edoardo Albinati, born in 1956, focuses on man as a species in his colossal novel of almost 1300 pages and provides not only an autobiographical memory research, but also an anthropological, sociological, political, psychoanalytic, religious-philosophical and criminological interpretation of male education.
Albinati saves nothing. His novel offers entertaining portraits of teachers, real novels, genre pictures of the bourgeois family, listening protocols, lonely mothers' vignettes, architectural-historical explanations, bible studies, dream sequences, excerpts from diaries, love stories with luscious sex scenes, aphorisms, divorce dramas, lists of films and even short reviews of literary works , He lets his protagonist, who shares the name and some key data with the author, summon up everything that can be narrated. The result is a manic inner monologue and one of the most exciting novels of recent years.
His main venue is the eponymous "Catholic School" respectively the private high school SLM, which in retrospect becomes a kind of research laboratory.
As with an experimental setup, Albinati operates with abbreviations: SLM is joined by QT, the Quartiere Trieste, where the school is located and where most of the characters live - a dignified Roman residential area with impressive buildings and functional tenements.
The third component and, at the same time, the engine of the whole venture is the VvC: the crime of Circeo, one of the most gruesome acts of violence in the post-war era, causing shock throughout the country. Three young offenders lured a seventeen-year-old and a nineteen-year-old into a holiday home on Monte Circeo in September 1975, an area where middle-class Romans like to spend the summer, torturing, raping and torturing the girls until one died others just barely survived. Two of the three perpetrators were former students of the Catholic Gymnasium, the third was the brother of a classmate of the victims.
Edoardo Albinati, an Italian teacher at Rebibbia Prison and author of several very good books, one of which is about the prison, explores in this epic novel the question of what it meant to be electrified in post-fascist Italy, purged of the economic miracle from 1968 to grow up. He tells how Catholicism and the ideology of the family with its patriarchal structure, for centuries the foundations of society, came into crisis and how the bourgeois milieu failed to domesticate its destructive components. -
Maike Albath [
www.zeit.de/2018/48/die-katholische-schule-edoardo-albinati-roman-italien-maenner-gewalt ]
https://www.tellerreport.com/life/--%22the-catholic-school%22--the-man-as-an-incurable-disease-.Ske4AwhRX.html
There are few things the literary community relishes more than the appearance of a polarizing high-profile book. Sure, any author about to release their baby into the wild will be hoping for unqualified praise from all corners, but what the lovers of literary criticism and book twitter aficionados amongst us are generally more interested in is seeing a title (intelligently) savaged and exalted in equal measure. It’s just more fun
, dammit, and, ahem, furthermore, it tends to generate a more wide-ranging and interesting discussion around the title in question. With that in mind, welcome to a new series we’re calling Point/Counterpoint, in which we pit two wildly different reviews of the same book—one positive, one negative—against one another and let you decide which makes the stronger case.
Winner of Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize,
The Catholic School is a 1,294-page whopper of a novel based on an infamous real life crime. Edoardo Albinati was a classmate of the three boys convicted of brutalizing and murdering two young girls in 1970s Rome. He uses this horrendous act as a jumping off point to discuss misogyny, masculinity, and the Catholic church.
Despite its popularity across the pond,
The Catholic School has been met with some mixed reviews over here. In
Library Journal, Joshua Finnell compares it to Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood, praising it for its “precise language and philosophical diatribes” and
Kirkus recommends the novel to “readers who like their fiction laden with more reflections than deeds.”
The New York Journal of Books‘ John L. Murphy, however, comments that “much of this dense narrative reads like an academic treatise,” but also acknowledges that “the advantage Albinati may offer his perplexed or diligent critics may lie in his ability to explain and elaborate why and how his take on the sordid and sensationalized events of his teens transformed into a massive, garrulous analysis of Italian culture.”
Today we’re taking a look at Brendan Driscoll’s glowing review in
Booklist, which commends
The Catholic School for its “intense and intimate disquisition on masculinity, violence, and social class.” In the other corner, we’ve got
The New York Times‘ Parul Sehgal condemning its misogyny: “A peculiar, disconcerting feature of the book is how frequently it reproduces the conditions it purports to criticize.”
Reader, what do you think?
Was this really life? That is, was this my life? Did I need to do something to make it mine, or was it being provided and guaranteed like this?
“…an intense and intimate disquisition on masculinity, violence, and social class in 1970s Rome … Prize-winning Albinati, a fellow alumnus, does not shy away from grisly sensationalism … What initially seems to be context or digression—a hundred pages on bourgeois marriage; a hundred pages on rape—emerges as the book’s core, a knot of interlocking philosophical concerns that the author has spent a lifetime trying to untangle. Dense, sprawling, brilliant, like Rome itself.”–
Brendan Driscoll (
Booklist starred review)
“…a 1,200-page slab of lament, accusation, exorcism … a taxonomy of male types, of bullies and victims; a close reading of locker room behavior; an analysis of the correct proportion of vulgarity necessary for humor between friends … There are only a few scenes, lightly sketched; the modes here are the tirade and the aria—compulsively repetitive discursions with Albinati occasionally and apologetically catching himself … but Albinati is generally a humorless writer … A peculiar, disconcerting feature of the book is how frequently it reproduces the conditions it purports to criticize. It too is a harshly male-only space … Women generally appear here in slices—as membranes, fleshy protuberances, vessels for male insecurity and revulsion … Albinati conjures the minds of the killers and descends into them; we are trapped in their amber, their humid, claustrophobic logic. You expect him to take an ax to all this, to let in reason, but he merges with the muck.”–
Parul Sehgal (
The New York Times)
-
https://bookmarks.reviews/point-counterpoint-edoardo-albinatis-the-catholic-school/
In a quiet northern suburb of Rome, a woman hears noises in the street and sends her son to investigate. Someone is locked in the trunk of a Fiat 127. The police arrive and find one girl seriously injured, together with the corpse of a second. Both have been raped, tortured, and left for dead. The survivor speaks of three young aggressors and a villa by the sea. Within hours two of the men have been arrested. The other will never be found.
Known as the Circeo Massacre, after the resort area of Circeo, seventy miles south of Rome, where the violence took place, this atrocity made a huge impact in Italy in 1975; it then came back into public consciousness in 1981 when one of the culprits escaped from prison and fled to Argentina, and again in 2005 when the other condemned man, granted day release to work outside prison, killed a woman and her fourteen-year-old daughter. The dust jacket of the Italian edition of
The Catholic School tells its readers right away that the book is inspired by this near-mythical crime. Particularly shocking, and immediately felt to be an ominous sign of things to come, was that all three rapists came from well-to-do families, while two had recently completed their education at an expensive, highly respectable boys-only Catholic school run by an order of priests dedicated to the Holy Virgin. The author Edoardo Albinati attended the same school in the 1960s and early 1970s.
The logic of the novel, then, is that the school is to be put in relation to the crime, perhaps to serve as an explanation for it. And not just this school but Catholic schools in general, since the Italian title,
La scuola cattolica, could equally well be translated into English with a generic
Catholic School. The whole idea of a traditional religious education is undermined by the suggestion that, at least in our modern times, what it actually fosters is cruelty and bedlam. It was no doubt this sense—that something profound and profoundly evil had been revealed about an institution absolutely central to Italian culture—that pushed this mammoth twelve-hundred-page novel up the bestseller lists and won it the country’s most prestigious literary prize, the Strega.
But Albinati’s book is not so easily pinned down. It’s certainly not another
In Cold Blood, where victims, perpetrators, and their respective backgrounds are meticulously researched and the crime is analyzed in hair-raising detail. Albinati offers no extended dramatization of the events themselves, or the consequent police investigation, or the judicial proceedings. We do not follow the life of the girl who survived, or that of the culprit who escaped. Indeed, one of the charms and irritations of this extraordinary and extraordinarily long novel (just a few thousand words shy of
War and Peace) is how ingeniously it plays with our expectations. -
Tim Parks
read more here
Edoardo Albinati’s
The Catholic School is a recent winner of Italy’s biggest literary prize,
il premo Strega, and is coming out in the United States this month. Albinati’s novel is about a number of things—fascism, the petite bourgeois, Rome in the 1970s, growing up in a private all-boys school—and it revolves around the true story of an abduction and gruesome attack of two working class young women by men who attended the same school as Albinati.
I fell in love with Albinati’s poems two decades ago, when I was looking for writing that could both reflect society and inner life, that was neither cheap nor highfalutin. Albinati’s prose is the best Italian you can find. His books that precede
The Catholic School are short works of nonfiction or “autofiction” that would make a lot of sense in the United States’ current literary scene. Back then, the best Italian authors were writing that weird, poetic stuff that Americans have learned to love in recent years. Twenty years ago, it was as if everybody in Italy was a Ben Lerner or a Sheila Heti. Albinati has always been one of the best in that tradition, so it’s fantastic that American readers can read
The Catholic School now.
The following conversation about
The Catholic School was recorded at his place earlier this summer, on a hot July day.
–Francesco Pacifico
read the interview here
