Too Loud a Solitude: A Novel

By Bohumil Hrabal

A fable about the power of books and knowledge, “finely balanced between pathos and comedy,” from one of Czechoslovakia’s most popular authors (Los Angeles Times).
 
A New York Times Notable Book
 
Haňtá has been compacting trash for thirty-five years. Every evening, he rescues books from the jaws of his hydraulic press, carries them home, and fills his house with them. Haňtá may be an idiot, as his boss calls him, but he is an idiot with a difference—the ability to quote the Talmud, Hegel, and Lao-Tzu. In this “irresistibly eccentric romp,” the author Milan Kundera has called “our very best writer today” celebrates the power and the indestructibility of the written word (The New York Times Book Review).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 27, 1992
• ISBN: 9780547545882

Book preview

Copyright © 1976 by Bohumil Hrabal

English translation copyright © 1990 by Harcourt, Inc.

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

This translation of Too Loud a Solitude appeared, in slightly different form, in Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture. Volume 5. Ann Arbor, 1986.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Hrabal. Bohumil, 1914–

[Příliš hlučná samota. English]

Too loud a solitude/Bohumil Hrabal; translated from

the Czech by Michael Henry Heim—1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

Translation of: Příliš hlučná samota.

ISBN 0-15-190491-X

ISBN 0-15-690458-6 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-15-690458-2 (pbk)

I. Title.

PG5039.18.R2P713 1990 90-4313

891.8'635—dc20

eISBN 978-0-547-54588-2

v3.0116

Only the sun has a right to its spots.

—GOETHE

One

For thirty-five years now I’ve been in wastepaper, and it’s my love story. For thirty-five years I’ve been compacting wastepaper and books, smearing myself with letters until I’ve come to look like my encyclopedias—and a good three tons of them I’ve compacted over the years. I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me. My education has been so unwitting I can’t quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books, but that’s how I’ve stayed attuned to myself and the world around me for the past thirty-five years. Because when I read, I don’t really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel. In an average month I compact two tons of books, but to muster the strength for my godly labors I’ve drunk so much beer over the past thirty-five years that it could fill an Olympic pool, an entire fish hatchery. Such wisdom as I have has come to me unwittingly, and I look on my brain as a mass of hydraulically compacted thoughts, a bale of ideas, and my head as a smooth, shiny Aladdin’s lamp. How much more beautiful it must have been in the days when the only place a thought could make its mark was the human brain and anybody wanting to squelch ideas had to compact human heads, but even that wouldn’t have helped, because real thoughts come from outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, inquisitors burn books in vain. If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself. I’ve just bought one of those minuscule adder-subtractor-square-rooters, a tiny little contraption no bigger than a wallet, and after screwing up my courage I pried open the back with a screwdriver, and was I shocked and tickled to find nothing but an even tinier contraption—smaller than a postage stamp and thinner than ten pages of a book—that and air, air charged with mathematical variations. When my eye lands on a real book and looks past the printed word, what it sees is disembodied thoughts flying through air, gliding on air, living off air, returning to air, because in the end everything is air, just as the host is and is not the blood of Christ.

For thirty-five years now I’ve been compacting old paper and books, living as I do in a land that has known how to read and write for fifteen generations; living in a onetime kingdom where it was and still is a custom, an obsession, to compact thoughts and images patiently in the heads of the population, thereby bringing them ineffable joy and even greater woe; living among people who will lay down their lives for a bale of compacted thoughts. And now it is all recurring in me. Along with thirty-five years of pushing the red and green buttons on my hydraulic press, I’ve had thirty-five years of drinking beer—not that I enjoy it, no, I loathe drunkards, I drink to make me think better, to go to the heart of what I read, because what I read I read not for the fun of it or to kill time or fall asleep; I, who live in a land that has known how to read and write for fifteen generations, drink so that what I read will prevent me from falling into everlasting sleep, will give me the d.t.’s, because I share with Hegel the view that a noble-hearted man is not yet a nobleman, nor a criminal a murderer. If I knew how to write, I’d write a book about the greatest of man’s joys and sorrows. It is by and from books that I’ve learned that the heavens are not humane, neither the heavens nor any man with a head on his shoulders—it’s not that men don’t wish to be humane, it just goes against common sense. Rare books perish in my press 9 under my hands, yet I am unable to stop their flow: I am nothing but a refined butcher. Books have taught me the joy of devastation: I love cloudbursts and demolition crews, I can stand for hours watching the carefully coordinated pumping motions of detonation experts as they blast entire houses, entire streets, into the air while seeming only to fill tires. I can’t get enough of that first moment, the one that lifts all the bricks and stones and beams only to cave them in quietly, like clothes dropping, like a steamer sinking swiftly to the ocean floor when its boilers have burst. There I stand in the cloud of dust, in the music of fulmination, thinking of my work deep down in the cellar where I have my press, the one where I’ve been working for thirty-five years by the light of a few electric bulbs and where above me I hear steps moving across the courtyard, and, through an opening in the ceiling, which is also a hole in the middle of the courtyard, I see heaven-sent horns of plenty in the form of bags, crates, and boxes raining down their old paper, withered flower-shop stalks, wholesalers’ wrappings, out-of-date theater programs, ice-cream wrappers, sheets of paint-spattered wallpaper, piles of moist, bloody paper from the butchers’, razor-sharp rejects from photographers’ studios, insides of office wastepaper baskets, typewriter ribbons included, bouquets from birthdays and namedays long past. Sometimes I find a cobblestone buried in a bundle of newspapers to make it weigh more or a penknife and a pair of scissors disposed of by mistake, or claw hammers or cleavers or cups with dried black coffee still in them or faded wedding nosegays wound round with fresh artificial funeral wreaths.

For thirty-five years I’ve been compacting it all in my hydraulic press, and three times a week it is transported by truck to train and then on to the paper mill, where they snap the wires and dump my work into alkalis and acids strong enough to dissolve the razor blades I keep gouging my hands with. But just as a beautiful fish will occasionally sparkle in the waters of a polluted river that runs through a stretch of factories, so in the flow of old paper the spine of a rare book will occasionally shine forth, and if for a moment I turn away, dazzled, I always turn back in time to rescue it, and after wiping it off on my apron, opening it wide, and breathing in its print, I glue my eyes to the text and read out the first sentence like a Homeric prophecy; then I place it carefully among my other splendid finds in a small crate lined with the holy cards someone once dropped into my cellar by mistake with a load of prayer books, and then comes my ritual, my mass: not only do I read every one of those books, I take

Reviews for Too Loud a Solitude

[fizzypops-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Ummm...not sure what to make of this. I'd read other works by Hrabal and enjoyed them very much. While this book had its moments, there certainly weren't very many of them. Its 98 pages long! I feel robbed by the publisher. A real disappointment.

[tinwara · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is one of those books that give me a feeling that actually they are very good in a literary way, but whose meaning I can't quite grasp. Like the waste paper press, that plays an important role in this book, stuffed with old newspapers, books and paper waste from the shops, this book is, despite its 98 pages, also extremely full. Full of references to Czech history, to writers, philosophers, psychologists, to religion, and Czech culture. And full of symbolism (a returning reference to turds?). I felt that I didn't have enough specific knowledge to understand this all. I felt quite lost, actually, reading this book.Some books, especially good books, are multi layered in the way that even if you don't understand all the references, you still have a good story left. In this case I felt that the story without understanding its context was rather thin. The story deals with the way manual labour is replaced by automated labour and the art of work by plain routine. However, manual labour is not exactly glorified either, it is hard and dirty work, even if you could express a bit of your personality in it. Whereas the automated labour is rather cheerful and clean, but kills the imagination. Writing this, it seems an interesting theme to me! Perhaps the problem is that I just didn't feel that much sympathy for this character.

[akblanchard_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Hanta has spent the past thirty-five years pushing red and green buttons as the operator of a hydraulic trash compactor. It is a dull job, but Hanta doesn't mind it because it allows him to rescue books from the compactor's bale-making machinery. He takes these books home and reads them. He is one of the few people in Communist Czechoslovakia who still care about such things. When Hanta's alcoholism and frequent absences jeopardize his position, he has something of a nervous breakdown. At least I gather that that's what happened. This short, philosophical novel is packed with vivid imagery. I would have appreciated an introduction or afterward to help me put the book in context.

[dono421846 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Depressing but effective character study of a man who has spent 35 years recycling paper. The books he finds has given him an education in the old school, and he has turned his bales of compressed paper into works of art with a hidden, carefully chosen text at its center. But the times change, and a new assembly line procedure that can work ten times as fast destroys his routine and the identity he has built around it. It ends badly.

[lucasdwi · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hrabal captures the attention of the reader with the beautiful story of Hanta living in a contradictory juxtaposition. Simply written, Too Loud a Solitude is a intriguing novel beginning with, "For thirty-five years now I've been in wastepaper, and it's my love story," the story unfolds rife with symbolism and allusions.

[technodiabla · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This short novel was simple, clean, and profound. An aging book recycler sees the end of his profession as machines and youth take over. But he takes matters into his own hands and writes his own ending. The imagery was fantastic. I felt like I could see and smell the sewage and filth. The touches of wry dark comedy were wonderful as well.

[vaellus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A poetic, philosophical and tragicomic first-person narration of a bibliophile who has compacted wastepaper for 35 years in socialist Czechoslovakia. The heartbreaker is in the depiction of loving craft being displaced by unfeeling automation."Every beloved object is the center of a garden of paradise", a quote by Novalis dear to the narrator and also representative of the novella's content.If you like Hrabal, you might want to have a look at Robert Walser's work.

[lriley_43 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have papalaz to thank for the reccomendation of this book by Bohumil Hrabal. Its main character Hant'a is absolutely remarkable. There is an innocence about him that is wonderfully perverse. He goes about his daily agenda with an anarchic simple(single)mindedness and without a trace of cynicism. This agenda of his mainly revolves around work at a kind of a pulping mill(?) a job that he loves--as he loves the machine he operates--as he loves the printed material particularly books that he saves to take back to his home which is piled floor to ceiling everywhere with his collection of 35 years. He is a bibliomaniac, auto-didact working class hero all rolled into one with not a shred of the common ambitions of his fellow citizens--and might as well mention he's a hell of a beer drinker too as he's always building up a powerful thirst in his separating and saving mania. And it's not that he doesn't have human relationships only that he's free and easy in how he takes them--and all the above eventually and sadly leads to his boss punishing him by replacing him with others more diligent than he. Even in death though--a suicide by his beloved paper crushing machine he retains his kind of happy go lucky and hopeful spirit. He is made for the life he has made and for no other. And so I have to say I really liked this. Hrabal certainly had a talent for a ribald and eclectic kind of humor. Hant'a might be somewhat oblivious to the concerns of those around him but he is very unique. Going to have to check Mr. Hrabal out further.

[edwinbcn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For thirty-five years now I've compacted waste paper.Almost every chapter in Bohumil Hrabal's short novel Too loud a solitude begins with a sentence to that effect. It is spoken by a man who looks back on his life, a non-descript man, who has led an uneventful life.As much as his life has been a treadmill, it also symbolizes permanence. Observing the flow of young people on Charles Square, each with a star of genius on his forehead and sparkling vitality in their eyes, we sense that the stolid Hanta is looking back on his own youth. It is not clear how Hanta ended up in his cellar, doing his monotonous job of compacting paper, but the fact is that that's what he has been doing all his life.Thirty-five years is a life-time, till retirement, which stands at 62 years of age in the Czech Republic. Thirty-five years also stands for continuity, as counted back from 1975, it points to a beginning in 1940, or thereabout, the years of the occupation of the Czech Republic by the Nazis. In the minds of many East-European intellectuals, the end of World War Two saw a seamless continuation of dictatorship, from the ultra-right to the ultra-left, which they put forward as the ultimate insult to their Communist rulers.In many ways, Hanta stands for everyman, a traditional Czech man, firmly rooted in Czech culture, savouring his Pilsner Beer, proud of his city and country. In the grayness of everyday life, its dull monotony, he looks for moments of beauty. To Hanta, reproductions of paintings are as beautiful and valuable as the originals of those paintings. His fascination with books is more determined by their outside appearance, than by their contents.Bohumil Hrabal may have written the novel to protest censorship in the Czech Republic. Ironically, Too loud a solitude applies as much to his day as to ours. Hanta tries to save beautiful, antiquarian books, which have been discarded by libraries. The same type of destruction of the same type of books is taking place on a worldwide scale, as old, paper-based books everywhere are discarded and destroyed.Books have been destroyed forever, a fact all the more visible in cities with a long history, like Prague, where book burnings have taken place in all ages. However, no matter how aesthetically beautiful, books are only reproductions; they are only paper. Paper can be recycled endlessly, while books remain.

[Gero Zayas · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Es un libro maravilloso. Es triste, es profundamente humano, despierta amor y respeto por los libros y por las personas que los saben valorar. Es genial.

[datrappert · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is my second book by Hrabal. I thought I Served the King of England was a masterpiece. This one, not. At first, it is just too depressing and repetitive as it tells the tale of a man who has compacted books for 35 years in into bales that also include whatever vermin happens to be present--but I'm being too literal here, which certainly isn't the intent of a book written in Communist-era Czechoslovakia. Still, it just isn't a lot of fun to read, although it does start to get better toward the end. The narrator's reminiscences of his past life and loves are the book's best part. And the ending is fitting, to say the least.

[rhussey174 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It’s been a while since I finished Bohumil Hrabal’s novel Too Loud a Solitude, but I want to write something about it because it was such an odd, wonderful little book (98 pages). It took me a while to warm up to it, actually; I wasn’t in the mood for something as spare and quirky as this book is, but it ended up winning me over.It’s about a man, Hanta, who lives in Prague and works as a trash compactor, specifically a wastepaper compactor, and he rescues books from the trash to take home and read. He has towering stacks of books at home, and he sleeps in fear that they will fall and crush him. His education has been reading these books, and what an education it’s been: he finds all kinds of wonderful things, books by Seneca, Kant, Erasmus, Goethe, and Nietzsche, reproductions of Van Gogh and Gauguin paintings, and lots of other treasures.Hanta is a quiet and isolated man; most of his time is spent at work, and he works overtime in order to make up for his slowness: he doesn’t hurry through his job, but instead takes his time to appreciate the books that come his way. He’s so absorbed in his work, in fact, that he dreams about retiring only to buy a paper crusher so he can do his work at home. He occasionally wanders the streets of Prague and he sometimes gets visitors, most often his boss who is forever furious at him for not working fast enough, but most of his time he spends in the dim, enclosed setting cooped up with his machine. Early on in his career, he would get upset when people threw away good books and was particularly furious over the destruction of the Royal Prussian Library after World War II, but as time goes on, he becomes resigned, or perhaps numb, to the destruction, and just does what he can to save as many books as possible.Read the rest of the review at Of Books and Bicycles

[stbalbach_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Many readers see this story as an allegory, in particular a political commentary on the danger of banning books in a totalitarian society. But Hrabal was a better writer than simple allegories. Indeed it is a highly biographical work: Hrabal also worked as a trash compactor, also saved books from destruction and built a library of them at home, also drank lots of beer. Beer is a central element of this story, it is drunken riotous unpredictable comic romp with flashes on genius and splashes of scatological angst, sort of what happens when you drink too much - loose control of your body and hold forth with sporadic ideas of great importance from the ether. Hrabal is sort of a pseudo-magical realism, stream of conscious writer; what makes him so popular is the cinematic quality that has resulted in so many adaptations of his work (Closely Watched Trains most famously, but even Too Loud a Solitude was made into an animated(!) film in 2007). He was basically a bar fly who drank a lot and listened to other drunkards telling stories to which he incorporated into his work. He wasn't exactly a Charles Bukowski barfly, Hrabal was more classically trained, but there are some similarities.

[varwenea · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Originally published in 1976 in then Czechoslovakia (before the peaceful dissolution into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993), “Too Loud a Solitude” is a somewhat sad tale about a humble man, Hanta, who has spent thirty-five years of his life crushing paper. He views his work as nearly sacred – that his job is less about crushing the papers but more about saving the occasional beautiful and rare book, thereby amassing an enormous library at home including “two tons above his bed”. Each bale of crushed paper is meticulously assembled and decorated with a famous art on the outside. He admires his own creations though his boss is furious about his insufficient output, triggering his eventual demise. In “Too Loud a Solitude”, Hrabal uses his protagonist via both his actions - the preservation of books, and his thoughts - quotations from complex books, to express a certain beauty in thoughts, ideas that may never be fully oppressed, censored, or erased from life and history. Hrabal wrote this book later in his life, having lived through Nazi occupation and transformation of socialism. Hrabal’s angst is bled into the words in this book, both in the murder of his Gypsy lady friend in the hands of the Nazi’s and the murder of Hanta’s future via the new and too-efficient paper crushers. Though I am not drawn to Hanta as a person, I certainly don’t pity him. He lives in his own content, little world filled to the brim with books and beer. He washes his feet, one a day and no more. He hears the rats in the sewers as two dueling armies, and he shares his treasured finds with friends who would appreciate it too. It’s nutty and different from the world that I know, but I also think the current consumerism is madness too. Some Quotes:On Censorship:“…How much more beautiful it must have been in the days when the only place a thought could make its mark was the human brain and anybody wanting to squelch ideas had to compact human heads, but even that wouldn’t have helped, because real thoughts come from outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, inquisitors burn books in vain. If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself. …. When my eye lands on a real book and looks past the printed word, what it sees is disembodied thoughts flying through the air, gliding on air, living off air, returning to air, because in the end everything is air, just as the host is and is not the blood of Christ.”On Solitude:“…I can be by myself because I’m never lonely, I’m simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.”

[castlelass · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In this novella, protagonist Haňťa works in a paper disposal and compacting facility in Prague in the 1930s to 1970s. He holds a deep love for books and occasionally saves them from being destroyed. He is not highly educated but has expanded his knowledge by reading the books he has accumulated. His home is filled with great works of literature. When he visits a larger, more efficient paper processing facility, he sees the writing on the wall that his small facility will soon fade into the past. His drinking worsens.

For me, the best part of this book is the writing, with passages such as: “But just as a beautiful fish will occasionally sparkle in the water of a polluted river that runs through a stretch of factories, so in the flow of old paper the spine of a rare book will occasionally shine forth, and if for a moment I turn away, dazzled, I always turn back in time to rescue it, and after wiping it off on my apron, opening it wide, and breathing in its print, I glue my eyes to the text and read the first sentence like a Homeric prophecy; then I place it carefully among my other splendid finds.”

Hrabal elegantly expresses the joy that readers find in books: “And I huddle in the lee of my paper mountain like Adam in the bushes and pick up a book, and my eyes open panic-stricken on a world other than my own, because when I start reading I’m somewhere completely different, I’m in the text, it’s amazing, I have to admit I’ve been dreaming, dreaming in a land of great beauty, I’ve been in the very heart of truth.”

The book is about the finding beauty in simplicity. It is about solitude and the impact of change. It condemns the destruction of knowledge, which was prevalent at the time. It is sad, and I cannot say it was a particularly pleasant reading experience, but I appreciate its messages. I would not recommend it to anyone feeling depressed.

[jackdeighton · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Like Closely Observed Trains this book is short, indeed barely a novella, but it is beautifully written (and well translated into USian.) For thirty five years Haňťa has been compacting paper in a cellar room overrun with mice. During this time he has salvaged hundreds of rare books and stored them in his flat where they take up all the space and even hang over his bed, like a sword of Damocles ready to fall.Spiced up with reminiscences of Haňťa’s early life and encounters with his suppliers and his boss there is a characteristic Eastern European air of strangeness about the novella which borders on magic realism but does not quite stray into it. While Haňťa is working he sometimes has visions of various philosophers, plus Jesus and Lao-Tze, and ruminates on the fate of the mice caught up in his compactor, the battles between rats occurring beneath his feet and the necessities of having an “other” to confront.The routine of his job is underlined by the repetition in nearly every chapter’s first line of his statement about thirty five years spent compacting paper. This could be a metaphor for the dreariness of life under a dictatorship, or just of a relatively uneventful life in general. Yet there is incident too, little sparks of colour, variation and human interaction.The book is effectively a monologue, with little dialogue to speak of, presenting a bleak outlook on life - and, surprisingly for an Eastern European novel, absolutely no sex (although a gypsy woman does offer) - but Hrabal nevertheless engages our empathy and sympathy. Despite not having the same burden of history to freight the narrative Too Loud A Solitude easily stands comparison to Closely Observed Trains in terms of its examination of the human condition.

[andrewblackman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The narrator of this book is an idiot. His boss despises him, others laugh at him. He drinks beer all day, and works in a cellar compacting wastepaper. He has been compacting wastepaper in the same cellar with the same hydraulic press for 35 years, and has picked out classics of world literature from the garbage, amassing a library which towers over him as he sleeps, always threatening to crush him. Other times he leaves the books in the compacter, but arranges them carefully so that each bale he creates has its own unique literary character.Like other idiots and fools throughout literary history, Hanta seems in his simplicity and ridiculous behaviour to express something more human and true than those around him. He is shocked by his visit to the new paper-compacting factory, where gigantic presses compact mounds of paper a thousand times bigger than he can manage in his old hydraulic press. The workers at the new press do work that is “inhuman”, just tossing the books into the press, “and it didn’t even matter what page they fell open to: nobody ever looked into them, nobody even dreamed of looking into them.” Hanta’s lovingly-created individual bales have been replaced by unthinking machines operated by unthinking workers who just drink milk and laugh as they destroy the books.Having been written in Czechoslovakia in 1976, the destruction of books is of course an act of great resonance. This was a nation of strict censorship, where books would be destroyed if they were deemed to be against the state’s interest. Hrabal’s criticism of this censorship is thinly veiled, and must have taken a lot of courage to write at that time.It’s a story with resonance beyond the Communist bloc, however. It is not only books that are crushed in this book but individuality. Hanta is made obsolete by the more efficient new press, by a process more efficient but less human. This may have been a critique of the Czechoslovak government, but it could equally be levelled at “free” societies today. In our drive to do everything faster and more efficiently, we are losing something along the way, something so old and elemental we’ve almost forgotten what it is. As strange and probably insane as Hanta is, I found myself relating very strongly to the old man in the basement, struggling to hold onto what he cherishes, doggedly doing his job every day for 35 years and doing it with care and patience, despite the world around him valuing nothing but speed and efficiency.

[bayardus-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude has some good descriptions of the main character Hantá going about his paper compacting job, a career that exposes him to a myriad of books and also traps him in a cellar populated by mice, with armies of rats doing battle in the sewers just beneath his feat. There are also some good descriptions of how Hantá has created for himself a role of book and magazine rescuer for a few people who he turns over select tidbits to throughout the course of the story. Other than that, I don't have much to say about Too Loud a Solitude. Hrabal gives us a communist Prague police state, but doesn't do anything with it that I found particularly striking. At times Hantá hallucinates, or reminisces about his past, or visits his uncle. A few other thing happen too. At the end of the novella Hantá sees the end of his era and the rise of young communist laborers who don't have an appreciation for the things they are destroying like Hantá had. An older character realizing that his time is coming to an end and witnessing the younger generation replacing him is far from the most original story, but at least it gave Hantá some semblance of an arc, something that helped the story considering the rest of it felt so episodic.

I don't really know what I'll take away from this book (probably nothing): the description on the back describes the book as celebrating "the power and indestructibility of the written word," but that interpretation ignores the ending which clearly indicates that that the times when books will be snatched from the jaws of destruction are coming to a close. You might not be able to crush ideas, but the written word isn't invulnerable. Frankly, the idea that you can't kill an idea always struck me as a falsehood as well- ideas don't exist in some realm of Platonic forms, they're creations of humanity. Burn all the ways we've recorded it and kill all the people that hold it and an idea can die, perhaps to arise independently somewhere else, but perhaps not. To think that every idea has survived since the beginning of time seems very unlikely, not to mention inherently unfalsifiable.

There's another segment where Hantá visits his former love, the girl with the ribbons, that seems to argue that a life of actual experience is superior to the life of the mind that Hantá engages in with his books and his art. It's a bit of a strange message for the book to endorse. In general I don't think Too Loud a Solitude had a consistent message, which isn't something I absolutely require in a book, but which is something I like. Without a message this is the story of a man performing small acts of rebellion in a totalitarian regime not because of some idea of overthrowing the system, but because of his pure love of books. I love books too, but this story alone wasn't enough to stir much interest in me. The prose was good, but not transcendent, Hantá was an interesting character, but not one that felt like a flesh-and-blood man fully captured on the page, and nothing else in the book floored me.

Anyway, if I remember anything about this book in six month's time besides the image of Hantá operating his trash compactor on books and bloodstained butcher's paper in a mouse-colonized cellar it will be a miracle.

[gbill_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Toiling away in the sewers of Prague, the hero of this story has spent the last 35 years compressing books and other paper into giant bales for a living. He’s a tool of censorship, yet every so often comes across a book which he adores and rescues, piling it up on shelves in his house. It’s an empowering, madcap book about prevailing despite oppression, with symbolism in the filth he’s surrounded by, the armies of rats, and the wild flies. The book is replete with references to philosophy and classic literature, but as with ‘I Served the King of England’, I found it a bit uneven and that it sometimes degenerated into immaturity.Quotes:On censorship:“How much more beautiful it must have been in the days when the only place a thought could make its mark was the human brain and anybody wanting to squelch ideas had to compact human heads, but even that wouldn’t have helped, because real thoughts come from outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, inquisitors burn books in vain. If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself. …. When my eye lands on a real book and looks past the printed word, what it sees is disembodied thoughts flying through the air, gliding on air, living off air, returning to air, because in the end everything is air, just as the host is and is not the blood of Christ.”On oppression:“Not until we’re totally crushed do we show what we are made of.”On solitude:“I can be by myself because I’m never lonely, I’m simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.”

[theampersand · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Almost certainly the best novel about the Eastern European wastepaper recycling industry ever written. "Too Loud a Solitude" is a novelette that is by turns sad and pleasantly surreal, one of those little books where everything comes together beautifully and the author hardly wastes a sentence. We hear our narrator, the operator of a wastepaper press in Communist Prague whose work keeps him almost completely confined to a cellar, describe how he has spent his life both rescuing books and reducing them to pulp. At work, he's both voracious autodidact and sculptor, making sure that each of his bales has, for example, a great work of literature at its center or that its outside showcases some notable work of art. Even though it was published long before the Amazon Kindle was a gleam in Jeff Bezos's eye, "Too Loud a Solitude" is sort of a love song to the sheer physicality of books, paper, and the written word. People who are ideologically opposed to e-readers should enjoy it. It's not that our protagonist doesn't have deeply held opinions about the books he's known, it's that his treasured books also cause him to sweat, ache, and go through a few liters of beer a night. For a book about books, "Too Loud a Solitude" is often relentlessly, excruciatingly physical. We hear about the mice that infest our main character's cellar, about more than a couple of incidents involving unsavory bodily secretions, and about a lot of not-so-good-for-you lifestyle choices. But "Too Loud a Solitude" seems to thrive on these oppositions without ever seeming too much like a writerly conceit. We hear a lot about Hegel, about an ongoing, eternal war between rats in the city sewers, about the joy and pain that comes with compressing wastepaper, about a touching, almost wordless romance, and about the disasters that the twentieth century visited upon the city where it's set. Our narrator's got his hands in the dirt and his head in the clouds, and it makes him rather likable. This book's narrator is, in a certain sense, a hermit: I kept wondering which gnome-like creature in Czech mythology he most resembled. But, like many readers, he's doesn't feel lonely, even when he's alone. We also hear about the curious social network that our main character's job has allowed him to build up. He's visited both by the near-destitute -- who provide him with wastepaper -- and a collection of priests, professors, and other crazed readers, all of whom are constantly on the lookout for material that interests them, some of which the Czech government would destroy on purely ideological grounds. Most of the characters we meet in "Too Loud a Solitude" are, to put it bluntly, a few volumes short of a full encyclopedia, but I think the author is trying to suggest that to really love books, you sort of have to be. Also, even though this book is set before the Iron Curtain fell, we don't hear much about the dreary sort of socialism that defined much of life in Eastern Europe for most of the last half of the twentieth century. Our main character's paper-stuffed cellar and his house -- which is full to bursting with the volumes that he's rescued from the press -- provide him genuine shelter from a fairly colorless reality. Hrabal wrote this one under an authoritarian socialist regime, but he might as well have been writing about some of the less-than-admirable aspects late capitalism, too. His metaphors are nothing if not flexible. This is a book about literature, about books, and about how loving both of these things can help us endure. Recommended, especially to especially to those who've spent their lives haunting libraries, bookstores -- or, why not? -- paper-recycling facilities.

[stravinsky-544320 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"every beloved object is the center of a garden of paradise"

well, the end made a sucker of me.