Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School (FSG, 2019) redeemed a year in disappointing literature for me. Amid a slew of 200-page unambitious semi-autobiographical novels, the sprawling 1,200 pages of The Catholic School came as a revelation—and none too soon: I read them, rapt, over twelve days of Christmas, their macabre themes bleeding into my thoughts and adding to my already foul holiday mood. In the new year and decade, the tome sits on an altar with four of the best books or series I have read so far from this century: Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.
Like three of the others on that list, Albinati’s first novel to be translated into English has been described by some as semi-autobiographical or “autofiction”—though the author has insisted in one of only two previously printed interviews in English that the narrator of The Catholic School who shares his name is “not autobiographically [him].” This interview, conducted over email—questions in English, responses in Italian (translated by poet, playwright, and co-translator of the English stage adaptation of Roberto Saviano’s best-selling true crime book Gomorrah, Dave Johnson)—aims not to uncover the biography of the author Edoardo Albinati, but rather to dive deeper still into the world of his self-named narrator.
—Marcus Hijkoop, Managing Editor
12TH STREET: Edoardo Albinati the narrator writes, in the opening pages of The Catholic School:
Something made me think that sooner or later a decisive event would occur that, rather than explaining one by one the previous insignificant twists and turns, would stitch them together with an irresistible thread like the kind used to bind the pages of novels so that you keep turning them until you reach the end, unable to put the book down. And so, merely resembling a piece of fiction but also possessing the implacable coherence of a piece of fiction, my life and everyone else’s lives could finally be called true, and real… (4)
At the center of this novel is a brutal “true crime,” known as the “Circeo massacre” (CR/M) in Italy: three of the narrator’s former classmates at an all-boys Catholic high school, San Leone Magno (SLM) in Rome, kidnap, torture, and rape two young women, killing one of them. The CR/M becomes something of a national obsession—an “event,” perhaps, that lends a semblance of “coherence” to the narrator’s and everyone else’s lives. What is it about this crime—and perhaps “true crime” more generally—that so captures the public imagination? If it does lend a certain “coherence,” is this, itself, a kind of fiction?
EDOARDO ALBINATI: No. When I say “irresistible thread,” I do not mean to say that a crime can be the unifying feature of a novel, much less one that has many stories and many characters, like The Catholic School. Rather, let us say that the CR/M is the radioactive nucleus, like the plutonium bars in a nuclear power plant, buried within the book. You know it’s there, but from the outside, it’s invisible. Perhaps the voice of the narrator is the connecting element of my story, and rather than “coherence,” it confers a more existential continuity, precisely as the tone of one’s own voice. The life of an individual, in and of itself, taken in a brute way, is a fairly confused and indecipherable cluster of experiences; stories attempt to create coordinates—in short, to “make sense,” to reveal a plot among the rush of disconnected events. The Catholic School is located at midpoint between the chaos of existence and the unifying force of story. In this sense, and only in this sense, fiction is always a thousand times more coherent than reality. In any case, I would never have dealt with the CR/M without the autobiographical knot of having lived and studied with the killers—in the same houses, type of family, education, and so on. This is not just any story for me. Crime stories, as such, do not interest me at all.
STREET: The narrator writes early on that the “only way to free oneself of an obsession” is to study it, write about it, and then forget it (25). Near the end of his project, his obsession, he writes: “I write about it, in fact, not to commemorate it, but in order to ensure that it’s sealed and forgotten once and for all. By me, at least. I’m enclosing it in this book as if I were burying it. Amen.” (1094) Is this project a kind of purge or exorcism for the narrator? What is it that motivates him to “bury” his obsession, and what necessitates that he first write about it at such length?
ALBINATI: Often, at least in Italy, we imagine that the main function of books is to preserve memory, to prevent oblivion at all cost. There is almost an obligation to memory, a permanent campaign in favor of reading (still less practiced in Italy than in other countries) as a tool that prevents us from forgetting this or that. On the contrary, I think that reading and writing are nothing more than wonderful tools used to overcome stories, themes, images, joyful or dramatic events, so that you can leave them behind; to consume experiences rather than preserve them, accumulate them. Make room within yourself, burn the dry leaves. Go through the events and overcome them. Writing is a process of awareness and, at the same time, liberation. It doesn’t serve to store the past. Yes, it’s an exorcism, but for both: for those who write and for those who read.
STREET: The narrator admits that he himself has relatively little to purge or confess:
[The priest] would ask me what sins I’d committed and I didn’t know what to answer. I would have been glad to accuse myself, in utter seriousness, of something very bad, but I searched and searched… I was ashamed to have so little to confess and, therefore, little of which to repent; I really was embarrassed, not of my sins, but rather of their paltry number and negligible nature, and as a result I wished I could invent a few more, to make a more interesting sinner of myself, one more deserving of forgiveness, a prodigal son. (57)
He acknowledges the risk of making a performance out of confession, “inventing a few more sins.” Later, he writes, “I had once read in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot… that ‘it is indeed possible to feel an intoxicating pleasure in recounting one’s foul deeds…,’ to which I would add, without even having necessarily committed them.” (970) What is it that drives this “pleasure of self-accusation,” as your narrator calls it? (970) A pleasure in degradation? In making oneself more “interesting”? “More deserving of forgiveness”?
ALBINATI: All these things at once. Above all, the desire to become more interesting, to make the characters in your story more interesting. Evil, sin, are the salt of every story; and confession (the Catholic sacrament in its broadest literary application) represents the basic formula of many narratives. “Now I will tell you how I fell and how I got back up, of my mistakes and of my redemption…” As it is in The Odyssey…! The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Mon coeur mis à nu, etc. Impudence is at the core of the impulse to narrate. And in books, as in confessionals, only the unspeakable is worth confessing; what you feel ashamed of, not the beautiful and good things. Through writing, you can finally say things that otherwise you wouldn’t have the courage to say to anyone. Because, in fact, with writing you’re not talking to anyone. You can finally be honest, but at the same time be free to lie, to invent. It’s a strange form of responsibility, that of the writer, one who becomes solely responsible to the written thing and to nobody else.
STREET: Teaching Italian literature in Rebibbia, Rome’s largest prison, your narrator notes how it is “typical of inmates, even the shrewdest and wisest ones,” for “the perverse love of storytelling” to sometimes “[get] the better of discretion and caution.” (1064) What is it that motivates this “perverse love of storytelling”? Does the audience of a story serve as a confessor, of sorts, encouraging the confession?
ALBINATI: With prisoners, the real and invented facts are constantly mixed. Since the stories told in prison are unverifiable, they become legends. The only ones who verify them are the judges during trial, but even there the truth reached is only partial, and no one would say that the reconstructions correspond to reality. It’s a world of words, life detained—that is, a life suspended, where simulation, sincerity, screens, theatre, revelations, privacy, prophecies are inextricably intertwined.
STREET: Earlier, with the priest, your narrator admits to sometimes having:
…the even more sinister sensation that I had soft-pedaled my sins, telling them in such a way that I came out looking good, so that when all was said and done I got away scot-free, I practically deserved to be congratulated, if not for having committed them, at least for having recounted them so very nicely. Too nicely, in other words, like Rousseau and his Confessions. (64)
What is it that makes this sensation “even more sinister”? Is there a tendency in “confessional literature” to “soft-pedal sins,” so that the author comes out looking good, deserving of praise?
ALBINATI: In reality, the mistake is not to want to attenuate one’s own errs and vices, but to claim a license of sincerity, noble in itself, for having confessed them. From the committed sin we thus pass to the sin of pride, for having had the courage to confess. In short, it doesn’t work. Or, rather, it only works if the story is seriously interesting, intense. Will any acquittal be earned in this way, and who will give it? The reader. Perhaps. Who knows? But that’s enough of this pseudo-religious language, otherwise I feel like I’m in catechism class!
STREET: The narrator writes later that he finds “cloying the mind-set, of Catholic derivation, according to which in the face of wicked deeds, committed by others, the observer is obliged to pound his chest and accuse himself.” (780) He calls it a “sterile self-indulgent admission” and wonders, “Just how well has the morality of ‘we’re all guilty’ worked out, with its corollary, ‘and therefore we are all innocent’?” (780) What are the consequences of this “morality,” in relation to the CR/M and more generally?
ALBINATI: Here, I will have to refer almost exclusively to a mentality and a condition that is typically Italian. It is about Italy that I speak, and that’s it. Where the very noble concept of forgiveness and the extraordinary episode of Jesus preventing the stoning of an adulteress with the simple defiant phrase, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” has unfortunately become a kind of passport to condone or even cancel out the evil committed—because, after all, if we are all bad, then why should the bad be punished? Where is the line that separates good from evil, since everyone crosses back and forth? Absolute indulgence has always plagued my country, where any criminal can claim that others, the so-called honest people, are even worse than him. In short, anyone who observes the law is a fool or a hypocritical Pharisee. A centuries-old battle is underway about this, and the result is to live in a system that manages to be both lax and vexatious, anarchic and repressive, somewhat random—one day yes, one day no.
STREET: Earlier, the narrator writes, “Those of us [at SLM] who committed full-blown crimes, I believe they ended up committing them for the fun of seeing how far they could push it, by continuing to be ‘understood.’” (101) Is there a danger that such an eagerness to “understand” inadvertently encourages criminal, “sinful” behavior?
ALBINATI: Tout comprendre ç’est tout pardonner. [All understood, all forgiven.]
STREET: One of the narrator’s friends from school, Arbus, is during the “Years of Lead” [two decades of militant left- and right-wing violence in Italy] affiliated with a group of “Nazi-Maoists.” Your narrator writes:
I believe that what he was seeking in that curious political position was precisely the irreconcilable: if it hadn’t already existed, then he would have invented Nazi-Maoism himself expressly for that purpose, in order to disgust not only the fearful, the right-thinking, and the respectable, but above all his hypothetical extremist allies. (261)
Is Arbus also testing the limits of the public’s “understanding”? Later in the book there is a passing reference to internet “trolls.” (1113) Is there a through-line here between the extreme, “irreconcilable” positions that the likes of Arbus adopt and the kind of “trolling” that happens on the internet today? Is there a risk in trying to “understand” these trolls?
ALBINATI: I believe the current “trolling” phenomenon is the exact opposite of a challenge. The trolls on the internet may seem like lone wolves, but, in reality, they have a gregarious spirit, they seek alliances, join forces in gangs against targets (the easiest, women), venting their frustration, almost always anonymously. Arbus, on the other hand, is the typical boy who loves to provoke authority first-hand, to test its limits. In his own way, a little hero, a free thinker. Trolls are monotonously consistent. Their hatred is predictable and goes one-way. Arbus, on the other hand, is unpredictable.
Going back to speaking in literary terms: in my opinion, the actions of a character cannot be fixed and known in advance by the author, who otherwise ends up creating a stereotype. The most beautiful characters are at least partly contradictory. They say and do surprising things, they discard the destiny assigned to them, they contain various souls within themselves. Just like people in flesh and blood, who are rarely monoliths, Arbus has this beauty, I think: that he could do anything with his life, for better or for worse, and what he will do we can only find out by reading.
STREET: Your narrator writes about his own anarcho-communist political affiliations as a youth, and how his views become more ambivalent later in life. He reflects:
Perhaps the fact that I [now] sway can be attributed to the profession of writing, which tends to make me adopt different positions from case to case, different ways of looking at things. It’s a collateral effect of this calling. Or else, perhaps, I chose this line of work precisely in order to afford myself the luxury of swaying, in order to encourage it, so that I could impersonate first this person, then that one, that idea… (611)
Your narrator is self-effacing, admits that he may have chosen writing as his line of work “in order to afford [himself] the luxury of swaying” in his political views. Is there a danger to this ambivalence? A lack of political commitment? The “impersonation”—or understanding—of those with extreme views?
ALBINATI: Today, I just try to be less categorical than I used to be. But some “NO”s, in capital letters, remain cut and dry, always the same. For example, “NO” to fascism, in whatever form it recurs. Besides, my personal political ideas are not original or interesting. As a citizen, potentially, my actions could be. My political “commitment” is reserved to the field: in doing, in acting—what little I can. When I write, however, I must be as free as possible, even from my own convictions—and, first of all, from my own identity, from my sexual gender, from my social class. It is not at all easy to do, but it is a necessary condition to get out of yourself and impersonate men, women, the elderly, good and bad, and so on. This is what I mean by “the luxury of swaying”: it is an integral method of opening up fully to things and people, even the ones most different from me. If we want, it is the same reason I work in a prison, where I meet individuals from whom I should, in theory, be and feel very distant. Instead, they are close to me, and I care immensely more for them than for people like me.
The image that struck me most during my university studies was that of the “chameleon poet,” coined by John Keats, if I remember correctly. The only membership to which I adhere, without reservation, is to the language in which I write: Italian. Here, with Italian, I feel only one thing: it is my root and my destiny—and, at the same time, it is a common gift that anyone besides me could use fruitfully. But even within the confines of this language, so rich and illustrious as to confuse and sometimes make those who speak and write it lose their heads, I try to wander—to take possession of what is already familiar—but also of what is foreign to me; I know I have enriched my way of writing Italian with the contribution of other languages. I have worked on it a lot, over time, especially when I was between the ages of twenty and thirty, copying long passages from books and trying to assimilate their mental structure. For example, I feel a certain solemnity and flexibility from French prose and English poetry.
STREET: Your narrator tempts the reader on numerous occasions to “skip a few pages”—even abandon the project altogether (95). There’s a sort of challenge being issued to the reader that could, of course, backfire. We are also told numerous times throughout the book that the narrator is “now preparing to write about” the crime at the center of the novel (434). By the end, your narrator admits:
Let’s also say that the story of the CR/M tucked away in this book wasn’t the only story. Alongside a given account and intertwined with it there are others, which branch out in every direction, like in a family tree, you can never say where one ends and the next one begins, so closely connected are they, origins and filiations. (1211)
What necessitated this form of storytelling, with all of its narrative offshoots?
ALBINATI: I think my mental confusion! The accumulation of project after project over the many years it took to write this book. The expedient of turning to the reader and suggesting, if he feels tired, or if the current topic doesn’t interest him, to skip to the next chapter, came to me from reading ancient Nordic oral poems, where the narrator occasionally addresses the listeners with a ritual appeal, such as: “Hey, are you still there? Or did you fall asleep?” There is one that even asks, “Are you listening to me, little piggy?” As if its only interlocutor is, in fact, a pig. Beautiful, isn’t it? The idea of having a pig as your audience! All the solitude a writer could desire, but, at the same time, the consoling presence of another being close by… an animal! The so-called public is a nebulous entity that no festival or literary festival can bring into focus for a writer. In one of her letters, Flannery O’Connor writes, more or less, “I worked on some typewriter, then I stopped because I was tired of talking about people who don’t exist to people who don’t exist.” It is an ironic but very apt formula: talking about ghosts (the characters) to ghosts (the hypothetical readers).
But, this time, with these patient and almost heroic readers of a book of 1300 pages, I had to be kind, gracious, stimulating, a little consolatory if they were discouraged or breaking their balls. It’s also true that my book is made into compartments, so that one can jump without excessive damage—even if the invitation to jump has often had the opposite effect: some readers have felt challenged, or that it was a kind of trick of mine, a trap. “Oh, yes? Albinati advises me to skip 30 pages? Instead, I’ll read them! Take that!” By putting together a book of this size, a relationship of challenge and brotherhood is inevitably established with the reader, who accomplishes an even greater undertaking than the writer, because it is more free-willed. The pleasure of the challenge lies at the core of reading such a book. Getting lost in its meanders, in its parallel stories, in its essay excursions, tearing your soul and then sweetening it, continuing the journey as if you were going from “coast to coast”—and then, in the end, ultimately defeating the book and its cursed author, turning the last page. Many of those who eventually loved the book, loved it because they hated it along the way. Then there are those who hated it, and that’s it.
STREET: Edoardo Albinati the narrator writes, about halfway through The Catholic School:
I’m always surprised when my writings are the subject of attention: not because I think they’re undeserving of it, but because when I hear others report back the ideas and stories of which I ought to claim paternity, they ring commonplace to my ears, not especially attributable to me, interesting perhaps, but written or spoken by someone else. (697)
Has that been true also for Edoardo Albinati the author during this interview?
ALBINATI: In general, I don’t believe we are the only owners, the exclusive owners, of our ideas. My brain is mine only up to a certain point: when he thinks, I watch him think, as if I were observing a stranger at work, and I am often amazed at what comes out of it. I may not even agree with my brain at all. Every now and then, someone quotes me a sentence that I wrote or a statement that I made, maybe many years ago in an interview, and my reaction might be: “Well, how interesting,” or, “Who said this pile of shit?” And this is not only because I have changed my mind in the meantime, but because the ideas, as I said before, are never generated by a single individual, are not his exclusive property or inventions—or, rather, they are his “inventions,” but in the original etymological sense of the term, that is, objects that he found, rediscovered, fished out and reformulated.
Almost all stories are repetitions and variations of ancient fairy tales. In the note at the end of The Catholic School, I paraphrased some verses of the poet Milo de Angelis: “If I were to return which is not mine / I’d have nothing left.” Ninety-nine percent of what is written in The Catholic School, I have heard from others, I have read in books or seen in the cinema, I imagined by putting together pieces of many lives that are not mine. Starting with the language I speak and write, how can I boast of being the owner or the inventor? I deeply hate the adjective “mine,” and I tend to use it only when I speak of “my” moped, which, in fact, I would not want stolen from me. But if they steal my idea, I have nothing against it: I’ve done it a thousand times and I don’t regret it at all—quite the contrary! There is really one thing in literature that has never been achieved in the rest of the world, except as oppression: communism.
—translated by Dave Johnson
- The Catholic School by Edoardo Albinati (translated by Antony Shugaar) is available from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.