It’s impossible not to chuckle when the copyright page of a book contains a content warning for ‘potential religious trauma, profanity, blood and mutilation, sexual violence, explicit language’ — such a tease! However, Bankrupting Sky Banks certainly follows through on that promise. In fact, the only criticism to be made is that by the sixth time I read ‘cunt’, I longed for pussy, quim, snatch, fanny, twat.
Erik Hofstatter’s latest volume is a welter of diabolism themed around the Borgia family who achieved significant power and notoriety in the Italian Renaissance era, including bequeathing two Popes (as well as cardinals and nuns, bishops and archbishops, governors and dukes) to the annals of history. Over the years, there have been recurring bouts of interest in the House of Borgia — two different TV dramatisations commencing in 2011; a novel by Mario Puzo (of The Godfather fame) released in 2001 after his death — and it’s to Hofstatter’s huge credit that his poetic treatment possesses both a uniqueness versus other tellings as well as an overwhelmingly visceral and fleshy quality to its words.
Historically speaking, there’s a degree of debate regarding the actual scale of the Borgias’ sins, given any family to accumulate such prominence amid the fraught politics of the 15th and 16th centuries was bound to attract rumour, innuendo, gossip and outright lies. This work, however, lies outside of the historical record, inspired by but not an actual testament to once-living figures. Instead, it follows four fictitious protagonists (Massimo, Riccardo, Alessia and Nico) alternately wallowing in or seeking to escape the mire of their own iniquity.
It’s worth noting that this volume has been published as part of Aqueduct Press’ Conversation Pieces series focused on feminist fiction, essays, manifestos, and debates. Bankrupting Sky Banks is certainly a powerful contribution with its portrayal of unrepentant grossness among the male figures: an overbearing father whose imposition on the life of his offspring is utterly base, who inhabits a world where a floor can be described as a “rolling old skin carpet” yet who holds the rank of Pope; a son who deflowers his own sister but still ascends to the highest levels of the church; another son whose adeptness at violence makes him useful while he is permitted to purge the memory of sin by drowning in alcohol.
For a significant duration there’s a dank tone to the volume, a sense that we’re hearing the inner voices of demonic men brooding in gilded rooms, spiralling amid paranoid and vicious thoughts of sex and violence. The arrival of sister and daughter Alessia changes the tone, speaking from a similar place of confinement — “It hurts. Having choice ripped from you” — but, while the men rage within prisons even they can see are of their own making, she has a clear external target for her anger: “He gets to bear a cross whilst I get to bear a child? Fuck you, father”. There’s that twisted love too, for her brother, curdling in the knowledge of what cannot be and how sorely she has been betrayed, trifled with, and let down by forces beyond her. Even if Alessia is corrupt, she is so clearly the victim too.
Again and again, there are images that glow regardless of their lascivious surroundings. At one point, there’s a fleeting description of sex with a young mistress — “it’s like I’m not digging into a body but into years she hasn’t seen yet” — which is such a perfect vision of the strange tangle of jealousy, pomposity, preening ego and self-regard that seems to inspire so many older men to parade their lust for tender flesh, as if it might fend off the image of their own grave. Even the book’s title is drawn from a line that declares “my death would bankrupt sky banks”, summoning the idea of a torrent of collapsing wealth so vast it can only be compared to the bounty of Heaven, an all-encompassing sleaziness whose end would be the equivalent of the Biblical day of judgment over all.
We live in an era where sexual imagery is at our fingertips at all times, where the acquisition of sex can be so effortless that it’s almost enervating — it sometimes seems it takes the baroque perversions of a Diddy or R. Kelly to shock. This volume certainly gains heightened resonance in the aftermath of so many (still ongoing) revelations regarding the ways in which so many religious organisations, and the Roman Catholic Church in particular, have tacitly ignored, accepted, and concealed the vilest abuses. It’s impressive how Hofstatter is able to portray the tangled fantasies and lunatic emotions driving the powerful to turn sex into grotesquery, the beauty of life into something irredeemably spoilt and ugly.
Similarly, there’s a reclaiming of the power of sex, that even these horrendously warped souls can only speak of it in the context of angelic mercy and sensations that feel like cleansing redemption. That ability to walk a line where one can read the divine and the profane within the same sentence is remarkably talented writing from Hofstatter, who has a deft hand for capturing complexity, the maze that is human experience, where lazy journalism and drama-writing tends to revert to signposted and generic good/bad.
With Bankrupting Sky Banks, Hofstatter has conjured a sensation, page by page, of being sunk so deep in the midst of corruption that there is no light nor a breath of clean air. It’s abysmal, it’s often horrible, but amid characters alternately celebrating or excusing their heinous and immoral self-indulgence, there’s always that glint or scent of where righteousness lies. It’s a powerful work in that, after this immersion, there’s no doubt how much better it must feel to live free and in the light.
WRITER
Erik Hofstatter
PUBLISHER
Aqueduct Press
RELEASE
Available Now
