>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. [silence] >> LUCIA WOLF: Good afternoon and welcome, everybody. And we are so glad to have you here at the Library of Congress for this unique opportunity with Edoardo Albinati, one of the most interesting and original contemporary Italian writers, but intellectual in general. But, I need to thank you, Edoardo Albinati for being here, accepting our invitation. I know you have a lot of appointments around town, so making time for this was very generous of you. And I also want to mention our co-sponsors who made this event possible: New Academia Publishing and especially Dr. Anna Lawton, and Italians in DC and the book club ParoLab. Finally, of course, I need to mention the Italian Embassy and the Italian Cultural Institute who are also participating in this event. So. Excuse me. I'm just going to get organized a bit. Let's start with a difficult introduction of Edoardo Albinati because your career is very impressive and you are, I believe, a Renaissance man we could say in some ways. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: I didn't realize there was a Renaissance in Italy, so if I am one of these men, I'm very proud just because it means that there is a Renaissance. >> LUCIA WOLF: Ah, okay. Let's hope there is a Renaissance and there was. Dr. Albinati was born in Rome in 1956. He comes from a northern Italian family. His mother was from Piemonte and the father's family was from Lombardy in Italy. That is the northern part of Italy. He attended the private school of San Leone Magno, in the so called Quartiere Africano di Roma. It is called Quartiere Africano? >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Quartiere Trieste. >> LUCIA WOLF: Quartiere Trieste. No need Quartiere Africano in particulare. Okay. The streets are named after African countries but Quartiere Trieste is (inaudible). Okay. He is here to celebrate with us his award winning novel for which he won the Premio Strega in 2016, and we're talking about his neighborhood and his background because that is a significant part of his latest novel. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Yeah, that is the best part maybe of this neighborhood. >> LUCIA WOLF: Oh Coppedè. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: yeah. >> LUCIA WOLF: Quartiere Coppedè. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Realized in a sort of late liberty style. >> LUCIA WOLF: Very fun to wander around that Quartiere Coppedè and notice all the various fountains. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Very good as a set for horror movies. >> LUCIA WOLF: Dario Argento. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Yeah Dario Argento. >> LUCIA WOLF: Certo. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Dario Argent shot his first movies there. >> LUCIA WOLF: Yeah. So I want to do something slightly different here. We're not going to only concentrate on his latest novel because I'm happy to say that we have almost every book written by Edoardo in our collections here at the library. There are a couple missing but maybe I can acquire them in the next future. So, I want to focus on your overall career rather and talk about also some other books, say some Svenimenti, Sintassi Italiana because I think that is as interesting as your latest novel for us here at the Library of Congress and in America. We were talking about San Leone Magno, the private catholic school he attended. You also attended Li Giulio Cesare for the last period of your high school years. This is all very important, we're touching upon it because again Roma is so much part of your works in general and in particular, these places, these locals are so much important for his latest novels. They're almost the main characters at time in the latest novel. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Yeah, that's correct. >> LUCIA WOLF: Giulio Cesare is also a very particular high school and it became iconic in our culture, right? Because there was an assault, a terrorist assault, at the Liceo Giulio Cesare in the 1980s. Rome at the time Edoardo was growing up and frequenting these schools and going to the Giulio Cesare, that was later 1980, was a very complicated place to live in because of all the terrorist attacks but also the student movements, and feminist movements, and protests every day but mainly because these were the years in which Italy and Rome saw this very tragic phenomenon of the Anni di Piombo, the so called Lead Years. We will talk some more about that. >> LUCIA WOLF: So, I am moving on. We keep all these main bits in mind because they're going to be part of our conversion later but Dr. Albinati graduated from Rome's University La Sapienza, which is also my alma mater and with the thesis supervised by Walter Pedullà who was a very important, and is still an Emeritus Professor at the University of Rome. The University of Rome had some of the most, the finest Italian literary minds and historians of the 20th century and so it was honestly a wonderful place to study and work in, in spite of the terrorist attacks and what that might have created, and the protests that might have created some fragmentary experiences. So, as I was saying Albinati is a Renaissance man, in the sense that he isn't only a novelist, he isn't only a poet but you also translated some important works, English works into Italian. Nabokov is one of them if I recall and also Milton. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: I adapted Milton for the theater. It was not really a translation. It's impossible to translate. >> LUCIA WOLF: Yes. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: I just cut and paste. >> LUCIA WOLF: Okay. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Very freely. >> LUCIA WOLF: Freely? >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Free. [crosstalk] patient. >> LUCIA WOLF: Well, you have to with Milton. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: But I liked that very much. >> LUCIA WOLF: I love- >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: I like very much cutting, more than translating. >> LUCIA WOLF: Okay. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Cutting and translating that. Adaptation is something a little different from translation but it's a good work for a writer. >> LUCIA WOLF: Yes, learning the inner dynamics of writing and ... So we were saying, it would take me a very long time to mention all the various not jobs but professions that Dr. Albinati has been doing- screenplay writer, radio broadcaster, editor, literary critic, novelist, essayist, poet, and also a reporter, a reportage in Afghanistan. But one of the other main jobs, I'm sorry, that Edoardo is known for is he teaches in Rome's prison Rebibbia. It's a very important part of your professional life and I think you're still doing that, right? >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Yeah. >> LUCIA WOLF: Okay. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: That's actually the ... All the other jobs I did them for a while, this one is the only one that I still do after 24 years. >> LUCIA WOLF: And you teach Italian? >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Italian and history. >> LUCIA WOLF: Okay. Wonderful. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: But more Italian because I don't know history very well so I tend to, I prefer to focus on language and literature. >> LUCIA WOLF: Right. One of the works we're going to focus on Maggio Selvaggio is also about your work at Rebibbia. Since 1984 you collaborated also with the literary journal Nuovi Argomenti, collaborated as an editor, Redattore. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: I think I stopped in this year. >> LUCIA WOLF: Okay. All right. Okay, so I have- >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: I quit in this year. >> LUCIA WOLF: Okay. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: I have a very confused idea about my career. >> LUCIA WOLF: That's- >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: As I told you, when I saw the books over there, I don't have many of them so I'm happy- >> LUCIA WOLF: Wonderful. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: -in some place they're kept. >> LUCIA WOLF: We'll do some facts-checking, which is something that we are all doing very often. These are maybe real facts but we need to look into this particular. So, I mentioned Nuovi Argomenti because it is also part of our collection here at the library. I happen to find the first two numbers of the Nuovi Argomenti, which was founded in 1953 by Alberto Moravia and Alberto Carrocci, two very, very ... two giants of Italian literature. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: That's why ... I'm sorry. >> LUCIA WOLF: Yes, please interrupt me. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Because I'm sure, since Moravia died in 1990, I quit. That's for sure. >> LUCIA WOLF: So it's 1990. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: That's for sure. >> LUCIA WOLF: By that time, you had quit. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI : Yeah. >> LUCIA WOLF: Your first novel Il Polacco Lavatore Di Vetri, the Polish windshield cleaner, was published by Longanesi in 1989. It provided material for a movie, which was directed by Peter Del Monte and released in 1998. We will talk more about this novel but you went on to write other novels, Svenimenti published by Einaudi in 2004. Tuttalpiù Muoio with Filippo Timi, published by Fandango in 2006, which we do not have yet and I was telling you that I would love to acquire it. Dr. Albinati also wrote collections of short stories starting with his very first one is Arabeschi Della Vita Morale, another item that is not yet in our collections but we have almost everything. Orti Di Guerra followed in 1997 followed by 19, which we also have outside in our display. Voci Nel Buio in 2005 by the publisher Charta. We received 920 books, a donation from Charta when they closed in 2014 and Giuseppe Liverani was here for that occasion. I noticed that in particular and I think it's important to tie in publishers, authors and the milieu of the whole situation and context. Anyway, progressing with Dr. Albinati's career as an intellectual and a writer, he wrote another short story collection Guerra Alla Tristezza! published in 2009, sorry I was switching to Italian, published in 2009 by Fandango again, which seems to be one of your main publishers. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: It's 100 meters from my house. It's the main reason I publish some of my books there. >> LUCIA WOLF: That's great. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: It's in the Quartiere Trieste. >> LUCIA WOLF: Yes. Practical. But he also wrote poetry. So we don't only have prose but poetry. Sintassi Italiana published in 2002. He wrote autobiographic works such as Maggio Selvaggio, which we mentioned before, refers to his work as a teacher in the prison of Rebibbia, not to mention his exceptional reportage from Afghanistan, Il Ritorno: Diario Di Una Missione In Afghanistan published in 2002. Now this doesn't do you justice but I just needed a brief introduction and we will move on to the next phase of our event, which is our conversation proper. But, I love the fact that you interrupted me and please continue to do that because it will flow more as a conversation and help me relax a little bit more. >> LUCIA WOLF: So, First of all, a very brief personal question. I'm very curious about this. How did your family happen to move to Rome, to be in Rome, from Northern Italy? I'm always curious about people coming to Rome and- >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: I must confess that I don't know. I never studied my family history and my parents gave us short information about their past. I only know that my father was the son of a builder and Rome was a good place to work. So there was a strong immigration in Rome, not only from the South as is usually thought, but also from the North. Many northerners came to Rome, this town, Rome was I think 80,000 people and it became the capital of Italy. >> LUCIA WOLF: The capital of Italy, yeah. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: To become a metropole like it is now means that they had to build buildings and many ... I think maybe 20% of the population have immigrated in town. >> LUCIA WOLF: From elsewhere. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: My father was an engineer so he wasn't not let's say a worker but he made projects and made money as well because it is quite a typical character of Rome, the builder. The middle- >> LUCIA WOLF: Upper-middle class. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Upper-middle class in Rome, the builders are very important. Now they decline but especially in the years, in the fifties and sixties, some of them were good and made a lot of money. My father, not too much but much more than me. >> LUCIA WOLF: This is interesting because Rome is again much part of your work in general and it has a very interesting history also of being a capital, like Washington D.C., with few people who are really seven generation Roman or seven generation Washington D.C. and so I just wanted to remark on that. You lived in Rome. You were born in Rome, you grew up in Rome and you lived in Rome throughout your life but you lived through one of the most difficult times in modern history, the so called Lead Years, Anni di Piombo. Rome was an epicenter but the Anni di Piombo affected all of Italy-Milan, Turin, and so forth. How did that period mark you and what do you recall of it? >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Well, this period has been called the Lead Years by the press, by movies but I would like to correct this idea, or this let's say "idée fixe", saying that this period was probably a period of lead and gold at the same time so it was not only a period of violence, or the violence at the same time produced good and bad things. I was not really affected. I was twenty- let's see, I was twenty-something when all this started to happen. It was not the organized terrorism, the real military groups like [inaudible] from the left or from the right. I was more interested, and affected and directly involved in the fact that during this period it was very easy to kill. For small groups, you didn't need to belong to strong organization, revolutionary, you could just, as I tell in my book, my last book, you can just spend one afternoon deciding with your schoolmates who do you want to kill the day after. Taking from a list of enemies, political enemies, some of them quite casually chosen, others like symbols, other just like personally hate. This world was the main issue. The fact that death was so easy to administer, to give and sometimes to be given. And this is something that happened especially in these neighborhood, that was apparently built just to be a very safe and calm and bourgeois neighborhood, like it was built with the purpose of nothing happening, nothing except having ladies with the small dogs around, or people running and walking. >> LUCIA WOLF: Because it's near Villa Borghese also so it's a very residential part of town. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: It's a residential place, quite neutral and that's probably exactly this fact, this neutrality that attracted these forces. It was like- >> LUCIA WOLF: A haven? >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: -sometimes I make comparison with the sport ring or a sport field in which nothing is there but everybody can happen because that two different teams, they fight there, and it was quite impressive because from 75 to 82 there were more people killed, left and far wing militants, policemen, judges- >> LUCIA WOLF: Politicians. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: -politicians, girls in this place. But the first great crime was not a political one, or maybe it was a political one but was a sexual crime, the one that is at the center of my book. >> LUCIA WOLF: Yes, so I was setting the stage also for violence because violence as you say it was ubiquitous, this sense of violence. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: That's why Dario Argento in a way understood the hidden quality of this place, the subterranean violence that was inside this building. >> LUCIA WOLF: I don't know if everybody knows about the latest novel we are talking about, La Scuola Cattolica, so would you like to just introduce because we were talking about 1975, about this episode that is at the center of your book. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Yeah, it's not the main argument when we talk about the book but it's actually correct to say that it is the center of the book, and it's the only reason why I wrote this book instead of another one. The fact that in this school, San Leone Magno, some students one year older than me in September 75, so the school was over actually for us, we were out of school, we were at the university, or I mean starting with the university, college, they kidnapped two girls, they brought these girls in a place close to Rome to the sea, a very beautiful but at the same time quite scary place called Monte Circeo, the mount of the ancient magician Circe. They abducted them, these two girls, there and during two days and a half orgy, they raped them, killed them or to say better, they killed just one of these two girls but they thought they were killed both of them. Then they put the two corpses inside the car and went back to Rome and left the car just under the place in which one of them lived and went to have an ice cream during the night. After a while, the girl who survived started to make- >> LUCIA WOLF: To knock on the - >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: -to knock on and to make noise and the police arrived. They opened this ... How do you call it? >> LUCIA WOLF: The boot. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: The boot of the car and they didn't understand what was inside. There is a very famous photograph because for a strange chance there was a photograph, not a police one. >> LUCIA WOLF: I know, I wanted to put it up there but, it's scary. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: I think that no kind of literature or words or telling can compare this photograph in which the girl's still alive, all covered with blood, comes out the boot and just in this moment, the caraboneers understand that the other strange- >> LUCIA WOLF: Bungled up in a blanket. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: -blanket is that girl. Two of these killers were taken just in ... because they were buzzing around as sometimes they say that the murderers, they don't want to leave the place in which ... they want to be captured and actually it is exactly what they did because they were captured, because they were found at three in the night walking around. The third one actually was never arrested and after a long, long chase around the world, it has been discovered in 2005 that he's dead and he's buried in Morocco under a false name, under a false identity of, how do you say a Legionario? >> LUCIA WOLF: French legionary. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: But of the Spanish branch of the Legion. So apparently he's dead. >> LUCIA WOLF: So I- >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: I know they were my schoolmates, that's the only reason why I wrote this book. >> LUCIA WOLF: This is the clue of the book but really as you say, it's not the main focus of your book, right? Because the main focus is La Scuola Cattolica, education in Italy, masculinity models, sexual education and so forth. So the great part of your book is the context. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: The context, right. >> LUCIA WOLF: An investigation of the context that led to this murder, this crime. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: I don't know if it led- >> LUCIA WOLF: Led, yes. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: -really led, mechanically led to this crime but as a writer I thought that it was useless and I could not add anything to the things already written and known if I write about the crime but I could write something about the families in which were very similar to mine family, the family of [inaudible], the same school, the priests, our teachers, the idea of male identity, this was only-male school at that time. After just five or six years I left school it became ... How do you say misto? >> LUCIA WOLF: Co-ed. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Co-ed. >> LUCIA WOLF: Yes. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Only because, not because of any ideological progress just because to have more students because the simple thing of not having girls after a while takes the school to the collapse. So let's say that all the things that were written about this crime were written until my book to mark the difference between let's say, people like me, or people like normal people and the killers. While I wrote about all we had in common, all the similar things, all the things we share, I share with them. I think there are two different kinds of morality. The very easy one is to separate yourself from the evil and this was the reaction especially from the male part of the public. They are monsters, we have nothing to do with this kind of violence, we condemn it, we don't want to be in any way compared or confused with the killers. There is another level of morality, more difficult to deal with that is to discover and to analyze and to tell what actually we have in common with them. What part of us is contaminated by the same evil. Also, because I think that a crime like this one was really contaminating, very contaminating. All the quiet society of this neighborhood, all the families, all girls and boys and parents were like ... How do you say? >> LUCIA WOLF: An enclave? >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Something happened and it was impossible to take the time back and except to try to separate, to- >> LUCIA WOLF: Refuse any- >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: -refuse any discussion about that because it's something that cannot be faced. I tried with my book to face it in the easiest way. The easiest way that is sincerity. >> LUCIA WOLF: So it's a responsibility. You feel this as a moral responsibility. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Usually I don't like very much the use of moral when you write but there is a moral position in writing that is writing without rhetoric, and without indignation, without false passion, without pretending to be scandalized by what you are because you are the scandal. >> LUCIA WOLF: Right. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: So don't be afraid to be a scandal. While very often especially in Italian literature, there is a sort of self-absorbing position in which the writer judge the reality and like separating good from evil. >> LUCIA WOLF: So. Wow, already? Oh well. Great. I wanted to go back to your other works because they are so much part of your career but also they depict another version of Rome and Rome's life and your life in Rome but time goes by so quickly. So, at this point, let's just insert something about your first novel because it's another aspect of Rome. We're talking about all this mentality, this lifestyle and customs in Rome especially of a particular class, right?. But Rome is also immigration, right? You have demonstrated an interest also. It's like a civic and socially engaged interest although you work on it with some sort of flair because Il Polacco Lavatore di Vetri, your first one was about Polish immigrants in Rome and a very common vision for any Roman stopping at the traffic lights and you would have these Polish, but not only Polish- >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: At that time, they were Polish. >> LUCIA WOLF: -cleaning your windshield, right? But yours is like an ironic take on this section of Rome's population and immigration in Rome at that time. Tell us more about this aspect also of this city. Immigration at that time and how it affected life in Rome but also how is immigration affecting Rome today? >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Well, when I wrote the book, the immigration was a very, very thin phenomenon. It was caused more by the fact of having a Polish Pope. So, at that time during the crisis of the Eastern countries, this was the first time we had immigrants because you know that Italy has been a country of people who were going abroad so we were the immigrants usually for more than 60 or 70 years from the beginning of the century until the sixties or...It has officially been declared finished, the Italian immigration abroad, in the seventies. Exactly in the same years, the process started to go the other way around and the first ones to arrive were the Polish people and this was very, very strange for the common image of the immigrant who comes from the South of the world, so he's darker, so is the usual one, the one who's happening, people come from Africa or from wherever. In this case, we had these blond, tall, sometimes very handsome man. At the beginning there were just men. It was a very strange ... I must confess, more than from the civic, or political or ethic point of view, I was astonished by the estetico presence of these, let's say angels, it's very easy to start working with the fantasy about his fact, being carefully, being tall and blond they were perfectly matching the idea of, especially in a Southern country as Italy is, where blond is- >> LUCIA WOLF: The perfection. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: -the perfection of light or the pure or the good or whatever. So I wrote a pure fiction novel about them without knowing at all that I was the first one to deal with this, that in few years it would have become a real issue, a real political issue not because of Polish but because of all other ethnic immigration. Until now there is a European problem, very, very heavy, and Italy is just like there in this position so it's the door of all this while 90% of the people arriving. They don't want to stay in Italy, they just want to cross Italy and is at the same time easy and very difficult for them. That's the reason why. I didn't imagine that I was opening an era because I was just interested in this. For the most, some of these characters in these novels are taken straight from mythology. So the very beautiful girl, Polish girl, is like heroine all good. >> LUCIA WOLF: Classical yeah. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Very classical and I didn't think to make a political statement about something that was not at the time a political issue. >> LUCIA WOLF: I brought that topic because it clashes also with the type of picture you painted, the Roman bourgeois in Coppedè, in Quartiere Trieste, this kind of enclosed type of community that is shocked by the murder you talked about but also there are other parts of Roman life and society at the time that are probably shocking also for people of the same background and it was interesting that you wrote about immigration way ahead of time, way before the problem really emerged. I am sorry but the time is expiring quickly and I would like you to be able to also ask some questions so I don't want to hog all of the time we have left and I don't know how much time we do. Okay. So I am going to let you ask whatever question, allow you to ask any questions and please feel free to ... >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Did you personally know those students who did the crime and did you ever imagine they could do something like that? And did they get sentenced, through the judgment? >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Yes I knew them because I was in school with them and furthermore, one of the two, Angelo Izzo, had a brother, a smaller brother who was in my classroom so it was my age. The killers were born one year before me but I went very often to the house of Angelo Izzo to study with his brother, being at that time the family quite ...having a lot of children of these middle-class families, it was quite common to have in these only-male school two or three brothers of different age. So yes, I knew them very well and I felt they were bastards but with this kind of ... The way in which you're a bastard in school, nothing more than this, they punch in the face someone or they broke the glasses of one of my schoolmates, but they did things ... They were fascists- >> LUCIA WOLF: Bullies. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: No, it was more like a political color let's say but they showed the way of being fascists not in a political way but more with arrogance, with ... But I didn't know when the big crime had happened that just after the school they were already being on trial for rape. I didn't know that because leaving the school I didn't follow their stories and paths. So, they were already in judgment for the rape of one girl and then they upgrade this area. >> LUCIA WOLF: Progressed. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: They went on to jail then, they were not in jail? >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: They were in jail for a while because they were released on parole, after a while there was a very strong economical compensation to the victim of the first rapes. But, after that, they were sentenced for life. But in Italy, you are sentenced to life but usually we don't do more than 30 years. So the real reason why I wrote the book is the fact that in 2005, so exactly 30 years after the first crime, one of them that was on parole committed another crime. He killed two women, mother and her daughter. The daughter, she was like 14 years old. It was not a sex crime. He just strangled them and buried them. This was the reason I wrote the book because if there wasn't this return of flame, it was like the eternal return of the blood of the crime, that obliged me in a way to reconsider the first story because I didn't want to write about that. I've been called, I can't call it really a vocation. >> LUCIA WOLF: Yes. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: A calling, a vocation. In 2005 and after one year of trying to understand how to tell the story, what to write about, I started. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm really curious about your activity, also about your activity as a teacher in prison. You said that you teach history and Italian. The Italian language or also the literature? >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Both. Both. I have to teach Italian to Italians. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Right, I was going to ask since you spoke about immigration, if your students are all Italians or also from other places, or countries. It's a novel question I guess. I'd like you to say more about what the motivation of these inmates is for studying especially literature. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Spend time. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I can see the reasons for history but also- >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: I can answer immediately, spend time. Spend time. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Because it's a way for them to engage in something. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: It's a way of doing something. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: How is that useful to them? And why literature than something else? >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: I teach in a school that has ... The main aim of the school is ... How do you say, informatic. So I'm the teacher of Italian but among the professors of Math or- >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Computer science. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: -computers or whatever, I'm the only one who makes humanistic teaching. But the main push for them is to go out of the room, how do you say? >> LUCIA WOLF: Do something useful- >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: To do something, to spend time- >> LUCIA WOLF: -purposeful. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: -to see people. To see people who are not guards, or who are not lawyers. So we are the only- >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: They wouldn't be interested in that otherwise. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: I think the main interest is a human one and not really- >> LUCIA WOLF: Intellectual. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: It's not intellectual. It's not purely intellectual. There are some of them who are like young nerds. Nerds are everywhere, also in jail. But it's just one in 100 let's say. It's an interesting place for teaching because- >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: [inaudible] >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Who knows? I don't know if they studied in jail. Studying in itself is not a warranty. It doesn't give you any insurance against the fact that continuing, keeping on your criminal life or not, that's for sure. I teach the son of a patriarch to a Moroccan coke dealer. I don't know if this is going to change his life or as soon as he will be released, he will start again, selling and buying the same stuff. >> LUCIA WOLF: Comet Zero. He'll not just imagine. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Zero unfortunately is dead. Zero is the boy I opened this book with, it was a very, very fat boy who died of a dose just two years after the book was written. Also the fact of having this kind of students that changes a lot, are released, or die, or they are moved to other prisons, teaches you to be very focused on having outcome almost immediate from every single hours you spend there. You cannot make plans for five years, for the future. So the future doesn't exist at all, there is only present. This time, this one, the same hour we are living now together in this moment and we have to squeeze from this hour everything we can because we don't know, I don't know, now I live, for being here I'm a liver, I will be next Monday again there and probably there will be something changed among my men. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: [inaudible] this crime of Circeo. You say many times that the press was focused on the killers but not on the ladies, we almost know anything about them and especially about the girl who survived, we've lost her traces. We know that she survived and then we don't know anything else about her. I was wondering why you too don't tell anything of the book on her? As long as that would be for a reader interested to, not only to have an insight on the killers but also on the victim. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: That's a good point. It was made many times about this book but I can write only ... I didn't make any research about the killers as well, I just knew them. I just knew how they felt, how they thought, how they lived and I could use all my imagination and fantasy to make an intensification of these things that I already knew. I knew nothing about the victims and I didn't want to. And I didn't want to make a book about let's say balanced, sort of the killers and the victims. So it's just about the killers. It's just about men. All the female characters are like- >> LUCIA WOLF: In the background. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Background or the up or down. They are never in the center. It's a quality or maybe a failure of the book, I don't know but I didn't want to invent on victims. Someone did in Italy, someone wrote a really awful book about the thought of the victim or especially the one who didn't survive, fantasizing about what she felt during the the [inaudible]. I felt it was out of my reach so that's why ... The school is only-male school and this is only-male book. There are sisters, mothers, fiancées, women raped ... But they're always like- >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Secondary characters. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Yeah, they could win the Oscar for- >> LUCIA WOLF: Runner up. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: -how do I say, supporting roles in this case. The next book is even more balanced. But this one- a very interesting fact that happened is that many, many women read the book because she was interested in this male world. So, it's quite strange that almost nobody complained about the fact that there were no, or such a few parts for women in this book. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you very much for this conversion. A comment and a question. As I hear you speak, you know, there is two words that keep on coming back to me, that is individuality and also the word, "roles." You have a series of roles in displaying who you are. I'm curious, I noticed you would comment on your place because it's kind of like a garland. You flourish here, and you flourish in another area, and in another area, and while- >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: I flourished in- >> LUCIA WOLF: No no you don't. You just flourished. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I don't want to say what is the world of the writer and what is your world? But I'm curious as to how you see yourself in this place and time. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: To be sincere, to me the problem is just of energy, it's just a physical problem. The fact that I have to waste a lot of energy around, scattering around, that's why my career is so contradictory as a writer and also as a man. I did many different things just because I had to spend myself somewhere, somehow, in different directions. Only in the end I hope will be sort of design in this going around. Also, this book is so different one from the other will probably at the end, I hope this end will be not so soon, but will form a shape, a significant shape. But the reality is that I have to through myself in something in which I'm lost. Teaching in jail is my main fun and my main hobby and it's absurd. I know on Monday when I'll be there, in this place that nobody in the world would like to stay in, I will ask myself again what I'm doing here, what the hell am I doing here? And I will do. So, writing is another way of consuming, wasting yourself, staying stupidly still at the table or doing nothing actually except playing with words, from an ethical point of view I think it's quite understandable. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a question about the character that narrates [inaudible] because obviously it's you, from some point of view, he has your experience from school, your job, but sometimes it feels like it's not, like it's fiction of course, so the narration is unsupervised. So I know I shouldn't ask this to you, but to what point it's you? And to what point it's not? If you could tell me [inaudible] leave it to me of course. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Well, in a word that is not me. That's very simple but this voice is built to use a large, huge chunks of my experience, myself, but as a literary creature, this narrator couldn't be exactly like me because I needed to have ... First it's a contrast with the other let's say the co-protagonists, the main character of the book is my schoolmate Arbus so I had to make Arbus, well Arbus was really clever and I could not be so clever as a character, so I think I am more clever than the narrator of the book. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: You are certainly less stupid. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: I'm not better but this ... The problem is that I don't know who I am so I cannot say that it's exactly me or not. I exaggerated some tendencies. For instance, in the book for instance I say that I always cry and it's true, I cried quite often, not always. This character cries, is never able to cope with reality, never. I'm able 50/50, always. It's what I call intensification. I don't know if it's the word with that sense or means [crosstalk] >> LUCIA WOLF: Magnification. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: It's usually what poetry do with reality to make it deeper, stronger, more touching, more something. Then they're bigger than reality, usually you say bigger than reality. So, I think that in the narrative way you need the same, so you have to do things bigger or weaker than reality. Anyway, reality, you cannot use it because you don't know what it is and if you are linked forever just to the reproduction of reality, it's strangling- >> LUCIA WOLF: Suffocating. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: -suffocating for writers. I must tell you one thing that surprised me a lot. The real person who's behind the character of Arbus after I published the book, reappeared after 30 years or 40 years in my life, he liked the book. He liked the fact that I used him as a sort of model for a character, many things which were completely invented, and the part invented was quite heavy for a real person to accept, and he accepted it, he liked it, he liked this joke, this playing with personality, or individuality, so he's a genius. Even in the book, I tell you that Arbus was a genius and I can, I have to confirm that the real Arbus is a genius because he's ready to be used by the play of life and literature. So he's really an open-minded person because he didn't defend himself, say I didn't do that, I didn't do that, and different. The same thing I did with me, I used myself, I used my body and memory and soul. I don't have any respect for life I must tell you that. I like life, I like the way of transforming, that's why I like mythology in which you change, you're a girl and you become a tree, or things like this. >> LUCIA WOLF: A goddess. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: You can become an animal or my favorite character, Teresi, you can be both man and woman. That's fantastic. I would like very much to have this privilege but I'm confined in my body. >> LUCIA WOLF: So we would have needed three or four hours for what I had in mind. I thought we had plenty more time. One hour looks like a lot of time but then when you actually use it, it's not enough. I think we have to stop here also take my friends the technicians above who need to stop and get going. But, thank you very much and I hope you all enjoyed this opportunity and thank you for being here. >> EDOARDO ALBINATI: Thank you. [applause] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.