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Too Loud a Solitude

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"For thirty-five years now I've been in wastepaper, and it's my love story." So begins Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud 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, Haòtá 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 and Bohemian history from 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.

I have just finished reading Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude and am reeling from its intoxicating effect. This book is not for everyone - there is no real "plot," and readers expecting a traditional narrative style will be bewildered and disappointed. But those readers who are sensitive to the beauty of language and wonderful thoughts will adore this book. It is pure poetry, lyricism, and philosophy. This is an incredible book, and I can't wait to read it again. And again, and again...

Hrabal was a master of comic tragedy. Even in his own death (he fell out of a hospital window while feeding pigeons) there is an element of comedy in the tragedy. This masterfully written book about the life of a paper compactor was written to move its readers to laughter and to tears. Hrabal managed to distill metaphors of nearly endless depth into a book less than 100 pages long. His writing is perfect. His style is a readily accessible stream-of-consciousness, very much unlike the atmospheric stream-of-consciousness we find in the elaborate works of James Joyce. What makes the writing so enjoyable is that Hrabal includes the tiniest details which make the story sing with flawless realism. This is a great introduction to the works of a tremendously talented author, and will leave you wanting to read more from Bohumil Hrabal.

Simply brilliant! Hrabal's story is a stunning piece of work told through the eyes of one of the most interesting charactors in literature. I have read the short novel at least once a year for philosophic ispiration and to take joy in the love of books, like the main charactor. When I finish I am left in wonder at how the western world has overlooked Hrabal for so long. What a poetic and marvelous book!

On sleepless nights, when seeking for peace of mind, sometimes I take Hrabal's "Too loud a solitude" and read a couple of pages from it. (Well, sometimes a couple of chapters.) Probably the reason it comforts me so much is that the language he uses is so beautiful. You probably have to have East-European origins in order to fully appreciate this kind of beauty, because the stories of Hrabal are all sad after all. But that's how life is in this corner of the world: a stange, grotesk mixture of humour, sadness, beauty and insanity. So it goes.

"For thirty-five years now I've been in wastepaper, and it's my love story." The narrator of Too Loud a Solitude expounds on his philosophy of life, of knowledge of books in this beautifully written and deeply rich and ironic book. He begins each chapter with a purposeful repetition, reminding us that he has been hard at work for 35 years, and this is his whole life. Although the book meanders without much plot, the metaphors put to work here are things of beauty, despite the fact that we are reading it in translation. "...When I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence in my mouth and suck at it like a fruit drop..." The juxtaposition of art rotting among garbage is clear and prevalent throughout the book.

Hrabal's narrator spins brief vignettes about events in his life, "portrait of the artist as an old mushroom face", always coming back to the idea of heaven. "Neither the heavens are humane nor is life above or below-- or within me." Or, "The heavens are not humane, but I'd forgotten compassion and love." Or better still, as the narrator begins to feel the hopeless feeling of technology and progress encroaching on his insular world, as books were destroyed vigorously, indifferently, thoughtlessly, "The heavens may be far from humane, but I'd had about all I could take." The new automated hydraulic wastepaper compactors had filled him with a shock; there was nothing human left in their work. No one stopped to savor the content of the waste. He realized it was the death knell not only for smaller compactors but to his way of life.

He describes how he received his education from these books unwittingly over the 35 years he has worked in this job, committing what he calls "crimes against books". But it was in this way that he came to see the beauty of destruction.

"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..."

"It never ceased to amaze me, until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I'd seen and been through, body and soul, in too loud a solitude, and slowly I came to the realization that my work was hurtling me headlong into an infinite field of omnipotence."

Hant'a works at the controls of a trash compactor, pulping books, newspapers and magazines for the paper mills. Occasionally, he spots a rare or interesting book and takes it for himself, obsessively reading and re-reading his treasures. His entire house is filled with books, 'the only space free is a path to the window and stove.'

He has so many books, in fact, that he fears he will either die by being crushed - thanks to the precariously stacked mountains of books around his bed and toilet, or he will go mad from the sheer amount of words trapped within his skull. Indeed, madness is, in its own insidious way, creeping up already. Books to him give off a magical light that reveals the thoughts and ideas locked within the pages, a light he believes he can see. Hant'a fears he is shrinking - a hasty measurement compared to a few years ago reveals that he is - but more importantly, he starts to fear fresh air and the company of others. He decided that, when he retires, he will take the trash compactor with him, to pulp books all day long, in the order he desires, pulping the books he wants to pulp.

While working or reading, Hant'a remembers, because remembering is all he has. Whether imagining Hegel and Lao-Tze, Schopenhauer and Jesus, or reliving an event in his own life, he remembers. Some of his stories are strange, like the armies of black and white rats he fears are warring underneath the city of Prague, or achingly sad, like his long ago love, 'a tiny Gypsy girl whose name I'd never quite known', a girl who disappears one day to die in a Nazi concentration camp, and who was afraid of kites.

Hearing rumours of a fancy new compactor, Hant'a visits a nearby town to investigate. He is horrified at the impersonal nature of the machine, of the carelessness of the destruction. With every bale of compressed paper that Hant'a creates, he places a much loved book of his own, a ritual of passage, a blessing for the machine. This new compactor does not allow for such quiet poetry, nor could an enterprising employee fish out a rare book caught in its great gnashing maw. He is even more shocked to learn that his bosses are considering a similar machine where he works, and that from now on he will be pulping blank pages, not lovingly crafted books.

There is a sadness to this book, a quiet, impotent sadness at the casual destruction of words and thoughts. Hant'a loves books for what they represent - ideas - and while he admits that he may not understand Kant, he can appreciate the beauty with which the man wrote. Virtually all of the books that Hant'a destroys are old and rare, and barring the ones that he keeps for himself or sends to libraries for safe-keeping, are destroyed with respect and care. Almost all of these books are very old, the most recent book having been published seventy years ago. It is almost as though Hant'a does not understand - or wish to understand - these new books, these mass-marketed crowd pleases. He has fallen for the beauty of the Talmud and Erasmus, and he cannot understand that another would not feel the same way. It is not hard to make of this story one big metaphor for the love and pleasure of ancient texts, it is there in the twenty or so references to Aristotle - and this in a 98 page novel. Too Loud a Solitude is sad, it is quiet, it is furiously impotent. A beautiful way to spend an hour or two, curled up in a quiet bookshelf, reading.

Too Loud A Solitude was published in 1976 under the watchful eyes of government censors. As such, this lyrical first-person account of an eccentric bibliophile who spends his days compacting books in a dank basement is not overtly political, and this is one of its strengths. It is touching in its simplicity and grand in its implications. The oppression and censorship which keep our hero behind in his labors takes a back seat to the joy he derives from the select books he is able to salvage from the press and the colorful cast of characters who come to call on him his sweaty cellar, including an absent-minded professor, a pair of sultry gypsies, and the spirits of Jesus Christ and Lao Tzu. It is a celebration of the humble pleasures afforded by art, food, drink, and friends enjoyed in familiar surroundings despite the encroachments of outsider government and rampant technological progress.

Written in 1976 (and translated into English in 1990), this thinly veiled attack on censorship under an authoritarian regime bears resemblance to many other Eastern European novels published at the time. Once again, we meet an isolated man struggling to be an individual in a society that enforces conformity; again, the story is presented as an allegory; and, par for the genre, the prose is a dialogue-free stream of consciousness filled with run-on sentences and redundancies. I've known many readers who complain that a foray into Soviet-era literature suffers both from both datedness and repetition, that one or two samples of this stuff will suffice a lifetime.

Yet there are two things especially that separate this short work from its counterparts. For one, it is, at times, genuinely funny. Hanta, the hero (and only real character) of the novel, is an unapologetic souse who finds offbeat amusement and accidental education from random snippets of books he rescues while at his lonely job for a waste compactor and paper recycler. While he's "pressing" his books, Hanta recalls madcap episodes from an early romance; his on-the-job inebriation summons up the ghosts of Jesus Christ and Lao-tze; he is harangued by the living stereotype of a supervisor concerned more with quantity than quality; and he makes his work more interesting by decorating his compacted cubes with lithographic reproductions of famous paintings.

Second, there's a theme running through this work that is as relevant today in capitalist societies as it was in Communist societies. Although he clearly regards the destruction of books as "a crime against humanity," Hanta's (and Hrabal's) nightmare isn't simply censorship. Resourceful individuals, like Hanta, have always figured out a way around that threat (even when it might mean punishment or death). Rather, the real menace is that new technologies, with their efficiencies and assembly lines, are making the creative individual obsolete.

It's the final nail in the coffin, and Hanta fears most that, after years of furtively and slyly keeping literature alive for future generations, it will be eradicated not by further authoritarianism and censorship but by the "new" affluence and indifference exhibited by conformist youth: "they just went on working, pulling covers off books and tossing the bristling, horrified pages on the conveyor belt with the utmost calm and indifference, with no feeling for what the book might mean." These new workers joke with their bosses, enjoy decent hours, and take vacations at new resorts. People are no longer living dangerously; instead of drinking alcohol during their breaks, these youngsters are drinking milk!

Hrabal's message is no different than what parents tell their kids in the Western world today (and perhaps always, in every society): we've fought and died for your freedoms, and now you don't even appreciate them. After spending most of his life struggling against conformity under authoritarian rule, Hrabal is warning against complacency caused by luxury disguised as freedom. It's an admonition as relevant today in America as it was thirty years ago in Czechoslovakia.

Too Loud a Solitude is a delightful, brief novel about a man who has compacted presumably banned books and other papers for 35 years. This gentle man narrates the story of his life, the story of his books. He has grown to love the doomed books that come to him, he is proud of his work, proud of what he has learned from his books. This is a unique, imaginative novel, one that I think anyone who enjoys a non-traditional approach to novel writing would enjoy. It is a wonderful story of a man who has found pleasure in life, doing a job which to many of us would seem tedious and depressing. He has adjusted to the cellar life his job keeps him in and manages to eke out joy where he can find it. I found this novel a delight to read and look forward to exploring more of Hrabal's work.