Edoardo Albinati
La Scuola Cattolica (audiolibro)

For some time now, well, for quite some time let's say, I've occasionally been listening to them, books, instead of reading them.
Mainly because it allows me, while listening, to do something else too. You know, today it's no longer possible to do just one thing at a time.
I find this aspect of modernity decidedly annoying: I love to fully concentrate on the things I do; I find it essential for my mental health.
I don't believe in multitasking, in fact, I know for sure that it doesn't exist and is a mere illusion, at best a topic for chatter at the bar.
In some cases, however, the activity to be performed apparently lends itself to being shared with listening to an audiobook. The ideal is while driving. But I practically never use the car, except for vacation trips.
And so while moving alone from one point to another, or while engaging in physical activity; typically, in my case, walking or biking or swimming. Or maybe while cooking. AirPods in the ears and off with the audiobook.
In truth, no matter how repetitive and automatic the other activity may be, there always comes a moment when you realize that for some minutes your thoughts have drifted elsewhere and the book you were listening to, you're not listening to anymore. And well, you go back and resume, even if this way the duration of the story lengthens, sometimes quite a bit.

This last statement is particularly important in the case of the book subject to this review, as it's a hefty tome that in "pocket" paper format skims 1,300 pages, while in "listenable" form it lasts 48 hours and 19 minutes.
Audiobook listeners know: 48 hours of listening are not few. If then the reader isn't particularly captivating, it happens that you get distracted often and continuously go back...
Well, I've been trying to finish it for months, I have five hours left and I hope to find them from now until the end of March. It went the same with "The Magic Mountain," 41 and a half hours of excellent narration, but anyway, it took me a while to get to the end.

So am I writing a review of a book I haven't finished reading (listening to) yet?
Well yes. In my defense, I can however affirm that:

1. in the meantime, I've seen the movie (The Catholic School, Stefano Mordini, 2021);
2. having listened to almost 90% of it, I think I can say with serenity that I don't expect big twists in the remaining 10%;
3. perhaps I'm reviewing the audiobook object itself more than this specific audiobook.

Anyway:
the good Albinati asserts multiple times throughout the story that its theme is the DDC (Delitto Del Circeo). In fact, however, he speaks of it relatively little; instead, he uses it as a link between the many topics he wants to address, indeed many and very varied, with sexuality and violence acting as a binder.

Classmate (catholic) of the authors of that and other crimes, he reflects, and also asks us to reflect (I believe, but it's not like I've heard it firsthand), on how small the leap can be to move from "good" to "evil"; on how natural it is for us to be violent; on how much family and school education affect this naturalness and our mental stability.
And then on the connections between black subversion, the State, and organized crime, on music, on the Italian upper middle class of the '70s, on literature, on religion, on German girls, on the dick the tits the pussy and the ass, adolescence and youth, art and artists, politics, rape, terrorism, the "well-off" neighborhoods of Rome, being male ("an incurable disease"), and much more.
He does so with consistently excellent writing, although in some phases the many digressions make reading and especially, as I mentioned above, listening a bit strenuous.
But not enough to discourage me.

That said, I wonder if in the case of an audiobook the judgment should be given to the book's author or to the one who reads it.
Well. I believe both, only that the DeBasio obviously doesn't allow it.

I will thus say that in this case the narrator is that of Giancarlo Cattaneo and that I don't like it too much. Too emphatic, and then often wrong in timing and pauses, so that the meaning of certain sentences is understood too late and at the cost of diverting from the flow of the discourse.

The film is useless.

The book, however, is really very beautiful.