The Encyclopedia Britannica entry for Czech author Bohumil Hrabal does not even mention his short novel Too Loud a Solitude, which Hrabal originally published as samizdat in the Soviet era. One of my bookclub members found it on a Powell’s bookstore employees' recommendation list, 25 Books to Read Before You Die/World Edition. Recommender Jeremy G. describes it as “a charming tale.”
I'm not sure “charming” is an adjective I’d choose myself. Maybe he was being ironic.
SUMMARY
The story is told by Haňťa, who opens with the words “For thirty five years now I’ve been in wastepaper...” The phrase is oft-repeated throughout the book like a musical refrain, as Haňťa recounts episodes from his poverty-stricken life in Prague, where he spends his days in his musty basement, compacting tons of books forbidden by the Soviet regime using a hydraulic press. He covers the bales of waste paper with discarded reproductions of classic art, placing a great work of philosophy or literature in the center of each bale, open to a page with a quote he finds compelling. Lacking formal education, Haňťa’s mind is itself a compacted bale of thoughts gleaned from the many masterpieces he’s read before consigning them to their destination as waste. Nearing retirement, he works and drinks and reminisces about past loves and the rats engaged in a continuous war beneath the city. Confronted with a new automated compacting machine and the disinterested Soviet workers who operate it, Haňťa sees the writing on the wall and imagines the “Press of the Apocalypse… all Prague compacted in it, myself included.” In a final grand gesture, he makes of himself, in his own peculiar style, a work of art.
OPINIONS
I loved it. Every page. Even reading it in English, knowing what’s been lost in translation. This book speaks to the context of the time and place of its creation while resonating disturbingly with the political and intellectual climate of the US today. I can’t help thinking that when I was born, Hrabal was actually employed in a wastepaper compacting facility in Prague, like the book's protagonist. Hrabal passed away in 1997, but his rats are still at war. Under all our cities.
A FEW FAVORITE SENTENCES
“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.”
“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.”
“…whenever my hydraulic press entered its final phase and crushed the beautiful books with a force of twenty atmospheres, I would hear the crunch of human skeletons and feel I was grinding up the skulls and bones of press-crushed classics, the part of the Talmud that says: ‘For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us.’”
I give it 5 crows. But hey, I'm a writer, and I'm probably not going to take the time to write about a book I didn't love.
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