The Catholic School

June 1, 2019
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.

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June 24, 2019
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.

Starred review from July 1, 2019
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from June 1, 2019

In 2016, Albinati (Coming Back: Diary of a Mission to Afghanistan) won the Strega Prize, Italy's most prestigious literary award, for the novel La scuola cattolica. Thanks to Shugaar, we now have an English translation. The story centers on a grisly account of the 1975 Circeo Massacre, in which three men raped, tortured, and murdered two women at their family's Italian villa. The men graduated from Istituto San Leone Magno, the same elite Catholic school Albinati attended, and lived in the same upper-middle-class neighborhood, Quartiere Trieste. A blend of semiautobiographical remembrance, police documents, and fictional accounts, the sprawling narrative unfolds in a series of dialectical vignettes about good and evil, wealth and poverty, and masculinity and femininity. The Catholic school stands as a cultural totem, providing a contradictory understanding of these societal elements through structured hierarchy and blind duty. This is not a tale of moralizing or understanding but more an illumination of the disparate aspects of Italian society that coalesced to produce this brutal form of toxic masculinity. VERDICT With its precise language and philosophical diatribes, Albinati's novel will draw comparisons to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood...though it's 900 pages longer. [See Prepub Alert, 2/4/19.]--Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2019

Albinati's semiautobiographical Strega Prize winner is framed by the notorious 1975 Circeo massacre, in which three privileged young men who had studied at an elite all-boys Catholic high school raped, tortured, and killed two young women. Here, the protagonist recalls his experiences at the school.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.