853.912 TOZ

Ambientato a Siena, il romanzo narra il tragico epilogo di una catastrofe finanziaria. Tre fratelli, proprietari di una bottega antiquaria di libri e oggetti, hanno abdicato ai loro impegni e alla loro responsabilità ponendosi fatalmente sul piano inclinato di un autodistruttivismo edonistico e regressivo. Minacciati dall'incombente bancarotta, vivono alla giornata, in una condizione di continua rimozione. Ma il fallimento economico li travolge inesorabilmente. Tozzi scrive con una castigatezza espressiva che rende potentemente la pena delle anime; il suo pre-freudismo scolpisce con forza i caratteri e si consolida nell'uso di un linguaggio sintomatico, attraverso il quale si affacciano alla realtà le strutture profonde della psiche dei personaggi.

I found this book and this author through an Italian exercise book (it creates exercises from literature excerpts; how cool is that?!) Anyway, I then read on an Italian internet book site that this author is "Dostoevskian". My interest was definitely piqued!
But now that I've read it, I'm not sure what to think. I'd almost call it Bressonian (if you'll allow a cinematographic comparison), but then Bresson was definitely into Dostoevsky.
Here's what Ortega y Gasset says about Dostoevsky:
"[His:] books are almost all extremely long. But the story that is told is usually quite short."
And then later in the same essay [1:]:
"[He:] is a 'realist' not because he uses the material of life but because he uses the form of life."
In other words, reading a Dostoevsky novel is like participating in the events in real life, form-wise.
Here, Tozzi's characters are definitely Dostoevskian, but is the form? I'd say no (this particular novel is only 100 pages long). Again, it's more like a distillation of Dostoevsky, in the manner of Bresson.
But now I'll have to read more Tozzi....

[1:] "Dostoevski and Proust" in _The Dehumanization of Art_, by José Ortega y Gasset, translated by Helene Weyl. ( )