A self-interrogation in the style of Knausgård, a thought novel like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest - this novel is as complex and intelligent, as polemical as it is political, as moving as it is significant. Rome in the 1970s, in the respectable neighborhood of Trieste... A few former students of the private school San Leone Magno commit one of the most brutal crimes of the time. Edoardo Albinati also attended this priest school back then. For forty years, he has guarded the secret of his "bad upbringing." Now he tells it, as if his reflection were winking back at him from the bottom of a deep well. The result is a novel of astonishing diversity. It deals with adolescence, sex, religion, and violence; with money, friendship, and revenge; with legendary teachers and priests, troublemakers, little geniuses, and psychopaths, as well as enigmatic girls and terrorists.