The Catholic School
-
- 8,49 €
Publisher Description
Now a major film on Netflix
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 his acclaimed and prize-winning The Catholic School, Edoardo Albinati creates a world: a world of power, sex, violence and the threat of masculinity, of the power wielded and misused by men.
In Rome in 1975, three young men, former students of the prestigious boys’ school San Leone Magno, persuade two teenage girls to accompany them to the seaside resort of Circeo. Neo-fascist scions of wealthy families, the men proceed to rape and brutally torture the girls; one of them subsequently dies. The event, which comes to be known as the Circeo massacre, shocks and fascinates the country, exposing the violence and dark underbelly of the Italian upper-middle class at a moment when the traditional structures of family and religion were under threat.
Edoardo Albinati sets his remarkable novel in the halls and corridors of San Leone Magno in the late 1960s and the 1970s. His own experiences at the school, reflections on his adolescence, and thoughts on the forces that produced contemporary Italy combine to produce a unique blend of memoir, coming-of-age novel and true crime. Along with unforgettable portraits of teachers and pupils, The Catholic School reflects on the legacy of abuse, the Italian bourgeoisie, and the relationship between sex, violence and masculinity.
Winner of the Premio Strega
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
