Tim Parks’s review for Harpers (vol. 339, no. 2032 [September 2019]: 84–88) of Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School refers frequently to the book’s length. After all, even though it managed to scale “the bestseller lists and [win Italy’s] most prestigious literary prize, the Strega,” it is still a “mammoth twelve-hundred-page novel” (85) that is clearly a bit of a slog. 

It is also clear that the novel uses its length to construct suspense and keep the reader waiting. The book is based on a true story, of the so-called “Circeo Rape/Murder”: the 1975 rape and torture of two women, one of whom ended up murdered, at the hands of three young men, two of whom were recent graduates of the “expensive, highly respectable boys-only Catholic school” (84) to which the novel’s title alludes. Most Italian readers would already be aware of this case, and so this “terrible crime [. . .] hangs over the book. And Albinati lets it hang. Not until page 153 does it get a first, brief mention” (85). Everything is laid out very slowly, gradually: “We are at page four hundred,” Parks later reports, “and still no sign of the [Circeo Rape/Murder]. Expectation is winding up.” Frequent digressions further postpone advances in the plot: “Just when you thought he couldn’t delay the arrival of the CR/M any further, the author launches into a long analysis of the transformation of the Italian bourgeoisie in the 1970s. IN this book long means long” (86). Every page, it seems, is an exercise in putting off till later what we know is inevitable.

“Finally,” Parks informs us, “a third of the way into the book, the crime is suddenly center stage. It is told in fourteen terse pages” (86). The brevity and concision of the telling contrast with the extrapolation and length of everything around it. “What now then,” Parks asks, with eight hundred pages still to go? One expects more and more about the CR/M. Intermittently it arrives [. . .]. But the main thrust of the book is now to establish the crime as emblematic of its era” (86–87). It is as though the crime around which the whole book is spun were no longer the main event, but mere symptom of something larger (and lengthier) still.

Parks likens the excessiveness of Albinati’s exposition of Italy’s many ills to an obsession: “Skip if it’s too much, we’re told again. Many will be tempted to do so. [. . .] For pages at a time, the reader longs to get back to the story, any story” (87). It is as though there is something unbearable about being forced to share in and spend time with the author’s (and perhaps also the country’s) anxiety and trauma, crystallized in this one crime and what it says about class, Catholicism, and gendered violence.

Parks finishes his review with the thought that, in part with such a long novel, Albinati is playing with his readers: “I can think of no author who has prompted in me such frequent shifts from admiration to irritation and back; who has aroused so much pleasure with his stories and reflections, and so much annoyance with his emphatic, exaggerated, paradoxical claims, not to mention the sheer length of this interminable book.” But perhaps, Parks continues, he is also alternately educating and punishing us: “it’s hard to feel, as the pages roll by, that this is not absolutely willed on the author’s part. The book itself becomes the reader’s Catholic school, at times a kind of prison where the same concepts are repeated ad infinitum, at times a kind of violence” (88). This is another take on the notion of a book that you “can’t put down.” Here, you are condemned to keep going, as if to serve a sentence (pun intended) for a crime for which you are forced to realize your own complicity.