Dystosyum

Reviewed by: Edoardo Gastaldi - November 26, 2024

Introduction to the author and novel

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“Dystosyum” is a novel written by the Italian artist Fabrizio Brugnera. Brugnera’s intrinsically eclectic approach to art naturally pushed him towards the creation of a rather unique and form-blending experience that sees a novel counterparting an in-depth introspective musical experience.

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The novel: contextualization, literary and historical linkages

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“Dystosyum” is a quasi-dystopian novel floating among and gathering elements from fiction, post-symbolism, Dostoevsky and Kafka philosophies, and modern dark psychological trajectories.

For literature purposes, let’s imagine a perhaps fun scene, that will conceptually help me to lead the readers towards the birth core of the novel “Dystosyum”. I invite the readers to sit down and picture this imaginary scene where, in a fictional future, Dante meets Thomas Stearns Eliot. At a point, the two guys encounter and start talking about their visions, operas, and philosophies. The brainstorming keeps progressing to the level that a new version of the Divine Comedy is sketched in their minds. Let’s do another step together, deeper. In the beautiful room where new philosophical movements are being created, in a darker corner far from Dante and Eliot, there is a third person. An introverted man, passionate about typewriting. He translates Eliot’s ideas in a Dante’s Inferno where, with no conceptual mediation, all the happenings, the desolation, the despair, and the madness, are referred to earth-grounded situations. Is Dante’s inferno real?, we may infer. This ambitious man, linking the dots of different literary movements and ultimately determining the virtual discourses between two pasts far away from each other is no one else than Fabrizio Brugnera.

And here we come to “Dystosyum”, with the right elements that make it handy to define it as a visionary, dense, fairly uncomfortable and disturbed, birth-out-of-societal-needs novel. The novel may see its place somewhere in between a very hollow and avant-garde sequel of Dante’s works and a shifted-baseline evolution of Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, where the focus is transposed from a collective to an individual dimension. The unreal world, the crumbling city - intended as any outer thing that is not me, and the overall constant flow of deep awareness, sadness, and sparse hope, make “Dystosyum” a valid philosophical angle able to stand out from the homogeneous development of modern literature.

The main character: key connector between the novel and the musical Album

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“Dystosyum” is not only the name of the novel. It amplifies its resonance as a word chosen for the main character’s name and as an Album title. We see a directional flow. We can perceive how everything moves towards a single trajectory. And in this all - in this vast amount of material we are put in front of - Dystosyum is the key. This figure is the main, if not to some extent the only, character of the novel and the only living being in which the reader can recognize himself (herself) in. Dystosyum appears as a non-well-outlined figure, a mystical and odd being – in literary words, the personification of a societal feverish externality-behaving condition affecting most individuals in the ordinary modern world. The protagonist is himself a critique of the distorted, unfavorable, jeopardizing, and restricted-choice-based society. This makes him very unique in a sense, yet resonating with the world at large. As the crocodile in Dostoevskij or the giant insect in Kafka, we understand how the novel’s story centers around an immense metaphor. Brugnera adds a delicate point to that: the criticism is not only a finger pointed at society and (by inference) at the author’s past, but also and foremost a finger directed to a mirror, ultimately sending the thoughts back to the self.

The book appears finally as a full circle intro- and outro-spection, pushing the awareness of the reader to its maximum level, too close to the heart and to the limits of logic and madness. It shows how human beings are capable of exuberant, poignant, fine, and sophisticated thoughts and scapegoats, yet bitterly remarking on the fact that we are the worst scientists in our own demise (Marko Zoric once said).

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The Album

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The homonymous Album, “Dystosyum”, consists of a 9-track opera intended as a comprehensive musical background to the novel. One can independently listen, or read, but when doing both together the immersion in the vast anthropological landscape depicted by the author pervasively increases the holistic sense of the work. The music is characterized by an intricate mixture of elements, mysticism, moods-setting minimalistic layers, and ephemeral repetitive structures that smoothly deliver the same sense that Eliot at times shares in his literary works: no matter how clever, the architectural infrastructures and metastructures are not able to cover the inborn desolation of the hollow man. Brugnera’s music depicts a phatomed man, that is perhaps as tragically beautiful as the phatomed-by-music Baudelairian sky.  Eventually, “Dystosyum” leads to the fulfillment of Brugnera’s aim as an artist: sharing his feelings and being a mirror, allowing the shaking of the listener’s consciousness.

"Dystosyum" (the album) is now available on all digital platforms