The Observer
Books 25.08.19 53Winner 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 horrifi ed
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 politic al
terrorism of Italy’s “years of lead ”
(the criminals were neo-fascists) to
the post-60s up ending 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 OveDeadly boys from good families
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 specifi city of his cultural
references may deter non-Italians.
Maybe, but fi ction can thrive on
detail and The Catholic School is
full of gusty generalisation: itsFiction
The Catholic School
Edoardo Albinati (trans
Antony Shugaar )
Picador, £22, pp1,280An epic prize-winning
novel strains to make
sense of a real-lifemurder in 70s Italy, says
Anthony Cumminschallenge might actually be its
lack of specifi city. 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.
To order The Catholic School for
£19.36 go to guardianbookshop.com
or call 0330 333 6846Q: I’m an English lit postgraduate
who’s slipped into a reading rut
since my fi nal exams. What are
some good books to get me back
into loving literature?
Anonymous, 24, PR and communications
A: Author and critic Hannah
Beckerman answers:
Ah, the perennial book slump.
When I’m experiencing a
reading rut, what I most want
is a great story, beautifully
told, and to be reminded of
the transformative power of
language. For this, I always
turn to The Vanishing Act
of Esme Lennox by Maggie
O’Farrell, My Name Is
Lucy Barton by Elizabeth
Strout or Life After Life by
Kate Atkinson.
Another good tactic is to
immerse yourself in epic,
multi-generational tales: try
Jane Smiley’s Last Hundred
Years Trilogy , which follows
the trials and tribulations of
fi ve generations of a family
from 1920s Iowa to present-
day New York. Or for single-
volume stories of epic lives,
take a look at William Boyd’s
Any Human Heart or John
Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible
Furies : both modern classics.
If you’re looking
for similarly exquisite
story telling but in bite-size
chunks, try The Collected
Stories of Grace Paley : quietly
devastating tales of postwar
American life.
For many people, a love
of reading was ignited in
childhood, so returning to
childhood favourites can
be an excellent route out of
reading ruts. In her recent
book, Why You Should Read
Children’s Books, Even Though
You Are So Old and Wise (itself
a great read), Katherine
Rundell convincingly argues
that children’s books can
speak to us throughout our
lives. There are few reading
slumps that won’t be cured
by Roald Dahl’s Matilda ,
AA Milne ’s Winnie the Pooh,
Noel Streatf eild’s Ballet Shoes
or Philip Pullman’s His Dark
Materials trilogy.
Finally, since reading
provokes empathy, narrative
nonfi ction and memoir
can help nourish the soul.
Adam Kay ’s This Is Going to
Hurt is both hilarious and
moving and will remind
you that books can run
the gamut of emotion
from one page to the next.
Meanwhile, the case studies
of psychotherapist Irvin
D Yalom, in books such as
Love’s Executioner , Momma
and the Meaning of Life or
Creatures of a Day, will, I
guarantee, make you fall back
in love not only with reading
but with humanity too.Hannah Beckerman’s If Only
I Could Tell You is out now in
paperback (Orion).
Submit your question to
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Book clinic
Edoardo Albinati: ‘abstract musing’.
Photograph by Angelo Loy