Status Updates From La scuola cattolica

Part III: Ch. 18
The author really strains toward empathy, even for evildoers (especially for the world's worst) extending it as an example to the lions in the colosseum. Maybe that's the impulse for writing this book, even if little has been said about the Circeo massacre.

Part III: Ch. 17
Torturing a classmate in a mock, backwards inquisition. The author paints a harrowing scene, calling it a “holy spectacle” and dwelling on the victim’s “chaotic glint” and the “tautening of his features.”

Part III: Ch. 16
Fast fowards like three decades. Meets one Ezechiele Rummo. The chapter is only a page long.

Part III: Ch. 15
Soccer, biblical parallels, so much screaming. And I quote: "Ahhhrrr!"

Part III: Ch. 14
Our skeevy little boys find themselves on a double date. Pik is spazzing out. The evening is going well, and whenever things are going well, he has to know why they're going so well, overthinks, sputters: "Listen. You don't need to do anything, Pik. Nothing at all, got it? Have fun... and nothing more..." An amusing chapter but little splendor.

Part III: Ch. 13
I guess him and Pik are friends now

Part III: Ch. 12
Narrator's classmate Picchiatello (nicknamed Pik) is bullied so much his bullies are practically studying him, memorizing phrases of his like a religious leader. Hatred it seems is a sort of devotion. Narrator soon obsessed with Pik's mother as well.

Part III: Ch. 11
Another sketch of his classmates. Five out of every six are insane, the narrator claims. The exception, of course, being himself.

Part III: Ch. 10
A novel is the exact opposite of chaos, it is the natural enemy of disorder...
All right, then, shut the book.
Turn off your computer or your iPad.
Turn off the light, too.
Throw the window open wide and let in the evening air.

Part III: Ch. 9
The narrator is shown Arbus's almost manic, enchanted drawings depicting landscapes and living rooms in excruciating detail, composed in a single continuous stroke, the pen never leaving the paper. Cryptically, reveals in eight years he will sleep with (or marry) Arbus' sister.

Part III: Ch. 8
Narrator obsessed with his classmates' (Arbus) mother

Part III: Ch. 7
On having a sister: All brothers are necessarily Karamazov.

This just a lot