The Catholic School

A Novel

By: Edoardo Albinati, Antony Shugaar - translator

Narrated by: Edoardo Camponeschi

A semiautobiographical coming-of-age story, framed by the harrowing 1975 Circeo massacre

Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School, the winner of Italy’s most prestigious award, The Strega Prize, is a powerful investigation of the heart and soul of contemporary Italy.

Three well-off young men - former students at Rome’s prestigious all-boys Catholic high school San Leone Magno - brutally tortured, raped, and murdered two young women in 1975. The event, which came to be known as the Circeo massacre, shocked and captivated the country, exposing the violence and dark underbelly of the upper middle class at a moment when the traditional structures of family and religion were seen as under threat.

It is this environment, the halls of San Leone Magno in the late 1960s and the 1970s, that Edoardo Albinati takes as his subject. His experience at the school, reflections on his adolescence, and thoughts on the forces that produced contemporary Italy are painstakingly and thoughtfully rendered, producing a remarkable blend of memoir, coming-of-age novel, and true-crime story. Along with indelible portraits of his teachers and fellow classmates - the charming Arbus, the literature teacher Cosmos, and his only Fascist friend, Max - Albinati also gives us his nuanced reflections on the legacy of abuse, the Italian bourgeoisie, and the relationship between sex, violence, and masculinity.

©2016, 2019 Text copyright by RCS Libri S.p.A., Milan; Translation copyright by Antony Shugaar (P)2019 Macmillan Audio

I thought the narrator was pranking me

The story is interesting, but it does not need to be this long. I started excited and eager to dive into the story, and I was impressed with the writing style, but by the time I got to around 500 pages, I started growing angry and frustrated because the "story" still hadn't been told because it was suffocated by excessive psychobabble. So I tried the audiobook version and, at first, I thought the narrator was pranking me because it is literally the worst I've ever heard! He sounds like Dracula trying a bad impression at an Italian accent--the r's are rolled so hard that it is almost comical. It was almost impossible to listen to this audiobook in its entirety because the narrator was comically and frustratingly distracting. I am trying to understand, trying to comprehend, why this is the voice and style they wanted for this book.