Too Loud a Solitude

Rating:
Summary: Chronicle of a Life and a Death Foretold
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: Chronicle of a Life and a Death Foretold
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: It is from books I've learned the heavens are not humane
Review: "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."

Rating:
Summary: A novel about reading books.
Review: An outstanding short novel. Although Hanta is apparently the main character I think actually "books" are. Wise books, old and new books, luxury or humble editions, long or short books. And, of course, the important thing is the relationship between all those books and a very peculiar reader. A reader that does not always know if his words are trully his or have been stolen from a printed page.

Too Loud a Solitude may be interpreted as a lirycal reflection on literature, life and the link between them. It is a sad story also.

Rating:
Summary: An exploration of the freedom to think
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Too Loud a Solitude
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Tragic Perfection
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: a magical gem of a book
Review: 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...

Rating:
Summary: hrabl is great
Review: it is amazing how much he accomplishes in such a short book and the diversity of his writing is amazing as well. this book is very not hollywood for example (as you will see) but "closely watched trains" which is also wonderful is very hollywood style. i served the king of england is in yet another style altogether. very beautiful stuff. i wish i could read it in the chezch because i am sure the language would be quite a bit more poetic. if you read more of his stuff you will see that he has a very weird unexplainable obsession with pigeons but other than that his novels make perfect sense.

Rating:
Summary: Too Loud a Solitude
Review: 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!