The Catholic School

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‘To be born male is an incurable disease’The winner of Italy’s most prestigious literary award, the Premio Strega, The Catholic School is one of the most arresting and haunting works of European literature to have appeared in the twenty-first century.In 1975, three well-off young men – former pupils at Rome’s prestigious Catholic boys’ school San Leone Magno – brutally tortured and raped two young women, killing one of them. The crime, which came to be known as the Circeo massacre, shocked and obsessed all of Italy, 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 and the homes of the families who sent their sons there in the late 1960s and the 1970s – that Edoardo Albinati takes as his subject in The Catholic School. His own experiences at the school, as well as his reflections on his adolescence and on the forces that produced the toxic culture of contemporary Italy, add up to 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 Cosmo, and his one fascist friend, Max – Albinati explores the legacy of abuse, the Italian bourgeoisie, and the relationship of masculinity, sex, and violence.‘In The Catholic School a thousand doors open on a thousand different themes . . . A powerful, multifaceted, acute, extreme book.’ La Repubblica‘Edoardo Albinati explores the history of male violence in his monumental novel . . . One of the most exciting novels of recent years’ Die Zeit