Berkley Center

In this article, Berkley Center Senior Fellow Paul Elie reviews Edoardo Albinati's new novel The Catholic School, which won the Strega Prize for best Italian work of prose fiction when it was published in 2016. The novel focuses on a central act of sexual violence committed at the Catholic school where the author was educated in the 1970s, and Elie's review examines how the author's portrayal of that act and his remarkably drawn-out musings on it reflect Albinati's own tortured relationship to his Catholic past. This article appears in the print edition of the August 26, 2019, issue of the New Yorker under the headline “I’m Not Finished.”