Product Description

TOO LOUD A SOLITUDE is a tender and funny story of Hant'a - a man who has lived in a Czech police state - for 35 years, working as compactor of wastepaper and books. In the process of compacting, he has acquired an education so unwitting he can't quite tell which of his thoughts are his own and which come from his books. He has rescued many from jaws of hydraulic press and now his house is filled to the rooftops. Destroyer of the written word, he is also its perpetuator. But when a new automatic press makes his job redundant there's only one thing he can do - go down with his ship. This is an eccentric romp celebrating the indestructability- against censorship, political opression etc - of the written word.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50611 in Books
• Published on: 1993-05-27
• Original language: Czech
• Binding: Paperback
• 112 pages

Review
'Short, sharp and eccentric . sophisticated, thought-provoking and pithy' SPECTATOR 'Unmissable, combines extremes of comedy and seriousness, plus pathos, slapstick, sex and violence all stirred into one delicious brew' GUARDIAN 'In imaginative riches and sheer exhilaration it offers more than most books twice its size . at once tender and scatological, playful and sombre, moving and irresistibly funny' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY Devastating... a superb book and a magnificent author' INDEPENDENT

INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
'Unmissable, combines extremes of comedy and seriousness, plus pathos, slapstick, sex and violence...'

INDEPENDENT
Devastating... a superb book and a magnificent author'

Customer Reviews

A career in liberating language and thought
Bohumil Hrabal studied law in Prague just before the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia and closed the universities. Although he graduated in 1946, his working life was spent on the railways, as a salesman, steelworker, stagehand, and compacting waste paper. In "Too Loud a Solitude", he comments that the intelligentsia was kept under tight control by both the Nazis and Communists, condemned to menial tasks and denied expression.

Hrabal was one of the foremost Czech writers of the 20th century, yet for much of his life was denied publication. He writes from experience - his prose captures the everyday language of the working man. In "Too Loud a Solitude", we have the thoughts of a man who, for thirty-five years, has pulped books for the police state.

The narrative places us inside the mind of Hanta, a misfit, ill-educated drunkard, whose solitary life is given shape and purpose by his job. He operates a hydraulic press which makes cubes of waste paper. The press is his only constant companion. But Hanta liberates rare books from destruction: he takes some home to stack in every available space, others he uses to decorate each cube of pulped paper, giving it a fine idea at its kernel, or decorating it with pictures of condemned art.

Hanta can quote Goethe, Christ, Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer. His education has come from stripping thoughts from the condemned books. He circumvents censorship. Ideas cannot be kept trapped on the pages of a book, or tightly bound within a cube. Ideas escape to infect the human mind. Destroying books simply frees their words.

The novel packages Hanta's thoughts - each chapter is a monologue, a series of reminiscences, hopes, dreams, experiences. But ultimately, he is dragged back to the real world - his hydraulic press is to be replaced by a huge, modern one. He will be made redundant - the working class is finally being eradicated by technology. After thirty five years, Hanta and his press are as obsolete as the steam train.

Hrabal gives us the everyday language of the pub: his characters are ordinary working people, their lives are given form by their work, and can as quickly be made meaningless.

But Hanta's life addresses the irony of censorship. Marx had spent so much of his revolutionary life reading in the British Library. Lenin, too, had read voraciously, fleeing Tsarist Russia in order to be able to think freely and elaborate his communist philosophy. Yet the Communists proscribe the working class' ability to read and write. The new socialist regime was no different from the Nazis in its determination to censor thought and expression. It would provide the acceptable answers, no one was to be allowed to ask questions.

Hrabal's writing has a distinctly visual quality. Although he was influenced by surrealism and by writers like James Joyce, his stream of consciousness style has still adapted well to the cinema - many of his works have been filmed. "Too Loud a Solitude" is a humorous, tender insight into the loneliness and isolation of a working man. It is an affirmation of human consciousness and imagination, written in a delicious style; it is a book to be savoured, re-read, dipped into from time to time, and valued for its humanity.

Read this book.
This is a fantastic book. It's very interesting in several ways: as a look at (a) life under a totalitarian system; as a thought-provoking exploration of books/art and life; and simply for the joy of the writing. The book's also very funny. It's teasingly philosophical, without being coyly or tweely so, and full of allusions which only add richness to the reading experience - they're never in-your-face or for effect. And the books main character isn't just a cut-out with which the author can vent his views. He's fully rounded. Julian Barnes calls Hrabal "a superb writer" and Kundera, without beung falsely modest, says he's the best contemporary Czech novelist. Here he isn't as self-consciously thoughtful/literary as either of those two, and he packs into a hundred pages more than most writers manage in many more.

A Beautiful Work
"For thirty-five years now I've been in wastepaper, and it's my love story." So begins Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude. The narrator, Hantá, has worked as a trash compactor his entire adult life and his job centers on creating machine compressed bales of waste paper. The most depressing aspect of his job is the fact that a core part of the waste left for compacting consists of books, hundred and thousands of books no longer wanted or desired by the then current political regime. Hrabal's novella explores in its own unique way the life and after-life of books and knowledge.

At first glance, Hantá comes across as an unwashed, miserably drunk, under-educated worker. However, from the outset it becomes clear that the books condemned to destruction by Hantá have left an indelible imprint in his own soul. Hantá notes that his "education has been so unwitting I can't quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books." He notes that he doesn't really read, rather, he will "pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop." As the story progresses Haòtá thoughts are sprinkled with thoughts and quotations from the Talmud, Kant, Erasmus and all the great thinkers of the ages.

Hantá cannot destroy all the books submitted to him for destruction. Rather, he has spent thirty-five years sneaking books out in his briefcase, one or two at a time. His modest house is overrun with books and Haòtá notes that too loud a sneeze could condemn him to death if the books towering over his bed collapse upon him. Despite the despair caused by the nature of his work and his being lost in too loud a solitude, Hantá continues to live for his books. At the end of his work day he makes his way home "yet smiling, because my briefcase is full of books and that very night I expect them to tell me things about myself I don't know."

Hantá's life though is beset with woe. His boss looks down upon him on account of his slovenly and drunken appearance and his work has been made obsolete by a new compacting machine on the other side of town. Hantá makes a trip to view the new compacting factory and upon his return to his own decrepit surroundings engages in a futile fury of compacting in a manner reminiscent of John Henry and his hammer.

Hantá is also wracked by guilt at the destruction of thousands of books. He hears the crunch of human skeletons whenever his hydraulic press crushes beautiful books with astonishing force. At the end of the day, Hantá attempts to relieve himself of his guilt by dint of the Talmudic saying "For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us." Hantá clearly wants to believe that he is simply releasing what is best in the books he must crush.

The tone for the book's conclusion is established by reference to this crushing of olives. Hantá's internal monologue reveals his awareness that he has consumed the contents of thousands of books. He is aware that he cannot write words that can express adequately all that he has learned. He is wistful at the thought that being crushed may be the best or only way to yield what is the best in him. Consequently, the physical contents of Hantá's last bale of waste should come as no surprise as the narrative ends.

Too Loud a Solitude does chronicle a life and a death foretold. Hrabal, despite obtaining a degree in law from Prague's Charles University was forced to work as a manual laborer in the 1950s. This included a stint as a waste compactor. In 1997, beset with ill-health, Hrabal fell or flew out of his fifth floor hospital room and plunged to his death. Some have argued that he slipped while feeding some pigeons. (Defenestration, whether self-inflicted or not, has played an important role in Czech history from the First Defenestration of Prague in 1419 through the death of Jan Masaryk in 1948). Having read Too Loud a Solitude one can only think that perhaps Hrabal, at the end of his life felt it was time to yield to the world all that was best in him once in a manner that would resonate for him and with his native readers.

Too Loud a Solitude is a beautiful, thoughtful piece of work that should be appreciated by anyone that loves the written word. By making us and Hantá wince at the destruction of the written word the beauty and importance of those words are heightened for all of us.