murder Posts

Edoardo Albinati’s “The Catholic School”

My review of Edoardo Albinati’s award-winning novel The Catholic School was published in The Hindu Literary Review on Sunday, 3 Nov 2019. It was publishing in the online edition on Saturday, 2 Nov 2019. Here is the link. Given the sudden space crunch, the published version of the review had to be shortened considerably. So I am c&p the longer version below.

Edoardo Albinati The Catholic School (Transl. from the Italian by Antony Shugaar) Picador, London, 2019. Pb. Pp. 1263 £16.99

The Catholic School by Italian novelist Edoardo Albinati is about the abduction and murder of two girls by three well-heeled boys — Andrea Ghira, Gianni Guido and Angelo Izzo —who belonged to the all-male Istituto San Leone Magno (SLM)The group had met at the Il Fungo, the Mushroom, a long time meeting spot for fascists. Over the next 36 hours, the two girls were tortured and raped. Rosaria was killed but Donatella managed to save herself by faking her death. The murderers dumped the bodies of the girls in a car boot. It was found after Donatella began banging on the roof of the boot. The notorious sex crime occurred on the weekend of 29 September 1975. The SLM is a private catholic school established in Rome (1887) by the Marist Brothers. It is also Edoardo Albinati’s alma mater. Albinati was a contemporary of the three school students accused of murder whom the popular press of the time described as “young and pitiless nabobs”.

Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School is about this appalling crime while also attempting to understand the minds of these brutal killers. At nearly 1300-pages, this semi-autobiographical novel, mentions the Circeo massacre briefly. Otherwise the book mostly consists of long digressions —philosophical, literary, anthropological analyses. His musings are mostly on how masculinity has been defined over the decades, for which he relies on extensive literary and popular culture references. He investigates the peculiar position that men employ in Italian society: from being mammoni (mammas’ boys) to virile, bursting-with-testosterone men in public spaces who have to prove themselves as “men”. Expecting The Catholic School to bea firsthand account of the slow transformation of the school students into notorious “killers” is not what one gets except for glimpses into Angelo’s criminal mind. The novel is more of a meandering introspection on understanding the potent mix of masculinity, fascism, violence and sex, that converted these boys into monsters particularly when all SLM students were given a firm religious grounding in their formative years by the Catholic Brothers. Albinati believes that religious instruction in many ways taught suppression of emotions resulting in the boys being akin to ticking masculine time bombs.

Albinati acknowledges that while the novel employs the first person singular narrative to tell the story these may well “differ from the author cited on the cover” as he “freely [interbreeds] memory and imagination”. In the mid-nineties, Albinati became a teacher in the maximum security wing of the Rebibbia Prison, Rome, where Mafiosi and Camorristi were among the inmates. In fact, Albinati says that he made “use of police reports, deposition manuscripts, wiretaps, interviews, and legal verdicts” as is evident in his descriptions of Angelo. These multiple experiences of knowing his infamous contemporaries at school to being in his adult life in close proximity to criminals who required to be under maximum security creates an astonishing monotone in the novel. It comes across as the author is doing his best to understand the sex crime committed but not really quite comprehending it, instead by offering many philosophical expositions on it, he hopes to find a rationale for these despicable acts. Albinati fails to be a convincing narrator. The reader feels no remorse for the criminals. All that exists is undiluted rage for there seems to be no change in society towards its attitude to women. It is curious that the author while seeming to be empathetic to rape victims by referring to the predatory attitude towards women and of offering the etymology of the Italian word as “stupro” (indicating something that causes stupor, astonishment, something that one wasn’t expecting), meticulously documents his own sexual encounters and then in the acknowledgements bizarrely credits his daughter for transcribing parts of his manuscript that he had written by hand! If that isn’t a way of perpetuating gender violence then what else is it?!

The Catholic School is also a testament to Albinati’s ambition at creating that “large and engrossing novel” that he has so far been unsuccessful at discovering. Albinati is well read and with confident ease experiments with the literary form. There are unexpected sections in the novel that are like lists, a poem, only dialogue or long monologues. At times he addresses the readers directly encouraging them to skip a few pages if they are bored by what they have read. He also flips back and forth in time recollecting his childhood and comparing it with modern times, particularly his children’s lives. Yet the story remains drearily flat, with even the descriptions of male violence dulling one’s senses, as Albinati remains mildly detached. Never does he offer any solution for the male brutality documented but uncomfortably seems to be accepting of the way society is. According to him, “Being born a boy is an incurable disease”. Written forty years after the crime, this novel won the topmost literary prize in Italy — the Strega Prize 2016.

The translation from Italian to English by translator Antony Shugaar is commendable. It reads smoothly. Shugaar does not believe that there are untranslatable words. As he says, “my goal is to carry the reader across that space so quietly that the spell is not broken.” ( VQR, “Loss, Betrayal, and Inaccuracy: A Translator’s Handbook”, 19 Feb 2014) Shugaar achieves this beautifully with The Catholic School for whatever the shortcomings one may find with the novel’s portrayal of its male world, there is no doubt that Shugaar has been faithful to his mantra of building bridges from untranslatable worlds to where we live.  

3 November 2019

A.J. Finn’s “The Woman in the Window”

[bwwpp_book sku=’97800626784160000000′]  A. J. Finn’s debut psychological thriller The Woman in the Window is about child psychologist Anna Fox who has a bad case of agoraphobia. Confined to her refurbished brownstone in Harlem she uses her Nikon to take photographs of her neighbours. It is very reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s storytelling particularly Rear Window. The resemblance is probably intentional as Dr Fox is addicted to watching black and white films of the past, many of the classic Hitchcock films are her perennial favourites. She suffers from depression as well so is constantly on a cocktail of prescription chemicals that are constantly being titrated by her doctor. He has to constantly advise her not take alcohol as she is fond of drinking Merlot. ( To her delight she has discovered that for an agoraphobic person like her it is convenient to order cartons of Merlot online and it will be delivered at home.) Otherwise she whiles away her time participating in online group chats with other agarophobic patients and playing chess.

The Woman in the Window is about Anna Fox who is confined at home out of choice and the supposed murder she witnesses across the street. Unfortunately she has a hard time persuading neighbours and the police that it is true and not a hallucination under the deadly influence of medicines and alcohol. The story takes a while to build up though the details are fascinating. It is only about 100 pages into the story that it zips along. It is being promoted to be a thriller in the same vein as Gone Girl and Girl on the Train. The chapters are short, sometimes only a few paragraphs, a form of writing apparently influenced by James Patterson’s writing.

A. J. Finn’s debut is being much talked about as it was sold in a hotly contested auction only to be won by William Morrow in a deal worth seven figures. The movie rights have been sold to Fox 2000 to Hollywood producer Scott Rudin who won an Oscar in 2008 for the adaptation of Tom McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. It is rumoured that Kate Winslet is in the running for the lead role. So far the book has already been sold in 38 book markets. A.J. Finn is the nom de plume for publishing executive Daniel Mallory who used to work at William Morrow but after the runaway success of his manuscript he has quit his day job. Instead he is focussing on writing his next novel. he is being represented by Felicity Blunt, Curtis Brown Literary Agency, sister to actress Emily Blunt who acted in the film version of Girl on a Train.

The Woman in the Window is also the first debut novel to have made it immediately to the NYT Bestseller List in nearly 12 years. Undoubtedly the influence of Hitchcock exists in the story not necessarily due to the constant references to his films. Though the story is a story that has been told many times before and there are sufficient hints in this novel itself to old films to how the plot is going to develop, yet there it rings true for the character sketch of Anna Fox. Apparently Daniel Mallory suffers from bipolar disorder and had been misdiagnosed for a very long time. So the descriptions of Anna and her breakdown are to a large extent “authentic”. Otherwise the plot itself is very thin and relies heavily on many details being shielded from the reader until the explosive conclusion. A very old fashioned trick. Be that as it may it is a book that will be read, watched on screen and talked about for a long time for the richness of detail and the pitch perfect suspense.

A. J. Finn The Woman in the Window HarperCollins Publishers, London, 2018. Pb. pp. 430 Rs 399 

12 March 2018 

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