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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.
'Too Loud a Solitude' relates the story of a young man, who, though working in a book pulping plant, loves books and attempts to save some of the better ones from being destroyed. As he spends much of his time with books, he picks up a lot of their language and cannot tell which thoughts are his own and which come from the books he is constantly surrounded by. And then a bigger, better pulping machine comes along...
Sometimes I think you read a book which just echoes through all other books you've ever read- 'Too Loud a Solitude' is thin but fat with... Read more
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