Book reviewed: The Catholic School by Edoardo Albinati (originally published in May 2022)

In 1975 two young women were lured into a villa in a deserted seaside resort south of Rome, where, over the next thirty-six hours, they were savagely beaten and raped. The ordeal ended with the murder of one of the victims; the other managed to survive by playing dead. The notorious crime, known as the Circeo Massacre, is at the heart of The Catholic School, a 2016 novel by Edoardo Albinati. For Albinati, this is personal. Two of the three perpetrators — all young men of bourgeois origins — happened to be alumni of San Leone Magno, a private all-boys Catholic school catering to affluent Roman families, and one the author himself attended in the 1970s. He has consequently a lot to say — on this topic and much else besides.

Although the novel garnered wide literary acclaim at home, snagging the coveted Strega Prize, it seems to have never taken off beyond Italy. Unlike other foreigners who have breezed through the ideological customs of literary America, Albinati hasn’t gone mainstream. Such reviews as I’ve come across suggest The Catholic School is no one’s idea of a masterpiece. Here is Kirkus Reviews: “Talky and pensive; for readers who like their fiction laden with more reflections than deeds.” Whoever wrote this would make a fine diplomat; there are worse ways of saying a book is a slog. For an example, you need only glance at Colm Tóibín’s takedown in NYRB, whose title says it all: “Nasty, Brutish, and Long.” Tóibín gets only one of those three things right — at almost 1,300 pages, the novel really is long — but then, judging by his own piece, Tóibín himself is no stranger to prolixity. He spends the first ten paragraphs talking about his early life and Musil’s Young Törless before he remembers he has a novel to review; what follows is an attempt to paint the work as a tirade by just another priapic male of antediluvian sensibilities shrieking from a cave. I wonder if Tóibín and I have read the same novel. The one I read turned out to be an illuminating work of art, at times moving, at times funny, never boring.

I am generally chary of reviewing books not read in the original, but Antony Shugaar’s translation is masterly; and having consumed the novel in all its Brobdingnagian entirety, I’d like to think an exception is warranted. The problem is that The Catholic School is not an easy novel to write about. First, there’s the question of what it is exactly that you’re reviewing: the book is marketed as a novel, but it doesn’t read like one. The work is written in first-person singular, and the narrator’s name is Edoardo Albinati. Like the real-life Albinati, the narrator attended San Leone Magno in the 1970s; also like the real-life Albinati, he now writes books and teaches inmates at a Roman prison. The narrator himself tells us “nothing is invented except for a few passages here and there, transitions that memory has deleted or ignorance has left obscure, or imagination has now taken upon itself the pleasant task of developing as it pleases.” The author’s note at the end of the book concedes more ground to fiction but, as with Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume My Struggle, the fictitious here is dissolved in the acidic juices of the autobiographical. Frankly, with the traditional novel on life support, this is just as well.

The real challenge for any reviewer is not the demarcation between the imaginary and the authentic, but the absence of any plot to speak of. The gruesome affair that underpins the novel is recounted in a dozen pages or so somewhere towards the middle. What’s the rest of it about? More or less everything. Albinati indicates at the end of the text that the novel absorbed forty years of his life (from September 29, 1975 — the date of the Circeo Massacre — to September 29, 2015), by which of course he means that the forty-year period arcs over the entire work. The story is told — though no story is actually told in the habitual meaning — in non-linear narrative; Albinati shifts between past and present ad libitum. To the characters inhabiting his time continuum (Arbus, the narrator’s physically unappealing but cerebral school friend who, we find out from the get-go, opens Albinati’s eyes; Arbus’s enigmatic sister Leda, with whom the narrator has an unconsummated love affair; the brilliant Cosmo, the only lay teacher at San Leone Magno and Albinati’s sometime mentor; the psychiatrist Rummo, another erstwhile school friend, etc.) he shows no more commitment than he does to chronology; though vivid and memorable, they drift out of the fog only to disappear into it once again, never staying long enough to monopolize the pages. No one character monopolizes them, not even the protagonist; lacking Knausgaard’s unapologetic solipsism, Albinati prefers to roam freely in the labyrinth of his mind, avoiding the trodden path of his quotidian existence.

There are long disquisitions and ruminations on everything under the sun, from bourgeoisie and fascism to masculinity and rape. Have I mentioned they are long? On page 131, the narrator mentions that Arbus found a woman to marry. He promises to tell the reader how that happened “in a few pages”; the mystery woman appears on page 1,016. Part IX — some sixty-five pages in total — is composed of what Albinati presents posthumously as Cosmo’s notes; these are numbered, following the format straight out of Montesquieu’s My Thoughts. Albinati is well aware his book is long-drawn-out, something he occasionally acknowledges by asking, “Hey, are you still listening to me?” or advising the reader to skip sections of the book when things get too tedious. For this reader at least, they never did. What makes The Catholic School so beguiling is that nothing happens, and yet, on the liminal horizons of your mind, everything does.

One of the novel’s central questions is the “why” of the Circeo Massacre. Albinati sees a nexus of phenomena: a decaying bourgeoisie that has lost its moorings; a legacy of fascism (the perpetrators had vague far-right connections, though the extent to which any ideology served as a motive in the crime is unclear); “toxic masculinity” (he doesn’t use this term, but that’s what it comes down to); and the war between the sexes, which Albinati considers the mother of all wars. “In the course of the hostilities unleashed by the emancipation of women,” he writes, “diplomacy had failed in every effort of reconciliation, and for those who bemoaned the sunset of the old order, no option remained other than total open warfare between the sexes, with the traditional entourage of retaliations and exemplary intimidations.”

Some reviewers have charged the novel with misogyny. What misogyny? The Catholic School is an indictment of men, though a dispassionate one. Albinati does not moralize; he is, first and foremost, an analyst of the human condition and not its judge. Nevertheless, his proffered opinions are gravid with the weight of an axiom — a problem in any context, and certainly in the context of Albinati’s dissection of masculinity and sexual violence (for the narrator, the two are indissoluble). In fact, where men are concerned, Albinati’s treatment of personal opinions as apodictic truths is perhaps the novel’s most glaring flaw. What is the reader to make of the statement that “if there’s a woman on earth whose faithfulness you should have doubts about, that’s your mother”? Or that “you can experience greater erotic satisfaction in strangling a woman than in masturbating, or else in masturbating after strangling her than in penetrating her when she is still alive”? Or that “violence provides meaning to a relationship that is otherwise devoid of it . . . Gratuitous violence awakens one from the torpor of empty, sleepless nights”? Not my nights. To be fair, Albinati — the author as well as his alter ego — works at Rome’s largest prison, a vocation that is more conducive to a dark interpretation of human nature than your average 9–5 office job. For a divorce lawyer, after all, adultery is a faithful companion to every marriage — but you’d expect a novelist to be a bit less dogmatic about these things.

As with the other subjects he tackles, Albinati’s examination of the underbelly of the male psyche is exceptionally thorough. Is it accurate? In one of the many moments of hilarity found in the book, the narrator and Arbus start going to the gym to stay in shape. The oafish gym owner, Ontani, has a habit of yelling, “Man is a beast!” to push his patrons to train harder. This is one of Ontani’s two fundamental truths; the other is that “woman is a work of art.” Walking a canine the other day, I ran into a couple who had just collected a bunch of children from a school bus — with one exception, all of them boys. The boys were playfully jostling each other; the sole girl in the group walked with the adults, learning in her own way about the world into which she had yet to be initiated. Catching sight of me, she sauntered over to confirm whether the dog was a golden retriever and see if she could pet him (“yes” to both questions); taking her leave a few moments later, she wished me a nice day, with the same unfailing courtesy. The boys were still pushing each other about. Watching them, I wondered if there wasn’t something to Ontani’s fundamental truths. But then human nature is savage; to ascribe savagery to men is to exclude women from human nature. Who got the first man to eat the forbidden fruit? One need not be religious to appreciate the point of the story of Adam and Eve — it’s not that women are wicked, but that it takes two to tango.

Albinati’s musings on the shifting landscape of gender relations are perspicacious, as when he remarks that the most violent reactions are produced when the guardians of the existing order feel most threatened. A besieged patriarchy spawns monsters. This is how Albinati explains the Circeo Massacre, and this is how he’d explain the 2018 van attack in Toronto, when a self-proclaimed “incel” plowed into a crowd of pedestrians to express his sexual frustration. But only those steeped in the ideological currents of recent times — currents that, if I may allow myself a few apodictic claims of my own, have poisoned relations between the sexes, sown confusion, and filled callow minds with rubbish — will see these crimes as a sign of a gender-based power struggle. What power struggle are we talking about if, as a result of said currents, men are disempowered? When someone like Dr. Warren Farrell, a women’s rights activist back in the 1970s (the decade of the Circeo Massacre), says men get the short end of the stick nowadays, we ought to take note.

The narrator of The Catholic School does not. He sees a potential rapist lurking in every male; anyone with a Y chromosome is a latent Jack the Ripper; every instance of sexual intercourse is an erection away from rape. Whatever the interaction between a man and a woman, the latter is always the victim; “Woman is the nigger of the world,” Albinati reminds us. By their very nature, men are unredeemable; they are bad even when they are good. Their motives are forever in doubt; if they express outrage over an act of rape committed by other men, it’s probably for the wrong reasons. In the case of the Circeo Massacre, the narrator observes that the rage of men fulminating against the perpetrators “did not seem like a preemptive rage or the furor of an empathetic identification with the suffering of the victims,” but rather, a “kind of identification, to be discarded with disgust should it ever surface, and namely with the murderers.” There’s a lot more where that came from.

In his attempt to penetrate the minds of the Circeo perpetrators, Albinati seems to dismiss the possibility that some people do bad things not because of ideological convictions, philosophical positions, power struggle considerations, or gender battles, but quite simply because they are bad people. Perhaps for Albinati this is too reductive, too simplistic a take on things. While tout comprendre, ce n’est pas tout pardonner, Albinati takes everything on its own terms, even something as heinous as the Circeo Massacre. Whatever happens is part of the divine order, however tragic — Albinati never states that explicitly, but it’s a view that doubtlessly corresponds to what he would have been taught by the priests at San Leone Magno, hence all the mental calisthenics. Personally, I am inclined to argue it would have been better if the Circeo perpetrators had never been born.

But perhaps this is not an objection against Albinati. We live at a time of shattered hierarchies and loose norms; inevitably, our perceptions of evil must have also evolved. If you reject all traditional points of reference, how can you tell right from wrong? We are bound to vacillate, struggling to make sense of things when evil strikes. During periods characterized by strong hierarchies, society knows exactly how to deal with its degenerates. When strong hierarchical structures are missing, society is reluctant to mete out punishment, as if it is no longer confident of its ability to judge. The fate of the Circeo criminals seems to corroborate that. One of them slipped away and was never found. Another was released in 2009. The third one managed to obtain partial release in 2004 and used his reacquired freedom, such as it was, to murder two women — a mother and her teenage daughter. The act of serving justice was apparently outsourced to metaphysical authorities.

As with any serious exploration of evil in the Western literary tradition, The Catholic School contends with the most important question of them all: does He exist? Albinati has a complex relationship with God. He spent years at a priest-run school but did not graduate from it, leaving for the secular pastures of a public one. But the education had left its indelible mark on him. Years later, people would ask Albinati if he’d attended a Catholic institution; a young woman told him he had it stamped on his forehead. While Albinati has led a decidedly impious existence, the question of God couldn’t have been far from his mind; it never is in the novel. Albinati the protagonist doesn’t seem to believe, but he wants to believe; and he wrestles with the question throughout the text, as Albinati the author has perhaps done throughout his life.

It is not until the last page that we get a hint of an answer. Immediately after confessing to having been a victim of a disturbing incident involving a priest during a school trip, the narrator shifts back to the present, when, in the final scene, he takes us to the Christmas mass at San Leone Magno. He’s been resolving to put in an appearance for years, and he’s finally made good on it. Is Albinati now ready to take on the big question? No spoilers here — in a novel without a plot, there can’t be any anyway — but the answer, if it’s at all an answer, will depend entirely on the reader. And that is just as it should be.