THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019 87
The narrator is preoccupied by a notorious crime committed by classmates in 1975.
BOOKS
I’M NOT FINISHED
Sex, violence, and power in Edoardo Albinati’s “The Catholic School.”BY PAU L ELIE
ILLUSTRATION BY BIANCA BAGNARELLI
A
very long novel—like Edoardo Al-
binati’s “The Catholic School” (Far-
rar, 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 Rain-
bow” 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, gratu-
itous, 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, Ital-
ian 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 Calvi-
no’s, as is Giorgio Bassani’s “The Gar-
den of the Finzi-Continis”; Giuseppe
Tomasi di Lampedusa’s grand novel
“The Leopard” is only a little over.
A very long Italian novel can seeman act of defiance; it is certainly an act
of imposition. Albinati’s “The Catho-
lic School,” originally published in 2016,
occupies almost thirteen hundred dense
pages. It became a best-seller in its na-
tive land, and was awarded the Strega
Prize (previously given to Bassani, Elsa
Morante, Levi, Natalia Ginzburg, et al.).
The English translation, done with un-
flagging vigor by Antony Shugaar, pre-
sents 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 ex-
ploration of “the gratuitous,” la gratu-
ità. 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.A
lbinati 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 Al-
binati, remarks, and the novel is formu-
lated as a work of personal history that
will disclose the inner life of contem-
porary 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 scru-
pulosity, 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 Cathol-
icism, for ideals of manhood. Albinati
and his classmates are “a theatrical
troupe” who “find themselves acting out
the Meaning of Life without yet hav-
ing lived,” and their school is “a minia-
ture 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 count-
less times (as in the affecting 2003 mini-
series “The Best of Youth”). This may
be why Albinati, even as he gestures to-
ward a generational saga, focusses tightly