"Too Loud a Solitude" by Bohumil Hrabal (review)

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A story about love for books as a way to freedom from the years that Czechoslovakia was a Communist dictatorship, and therefore a “current” topic because dictatorships - the majority telling the minority what to believe - seem to be proliferating again around the world.

This novella contains the story of Hanta who has been compacting paper for 35 years (before he could live from the pen, Hrabal himself did various odd jobs and from 1954 to 1959 he worked as paper compacter in a recycling mill in Prague). But his great love are literature and philosophy and every evening he rescues numerous books from the jaws of his press, carries them home, and stocks his small apartment with them to overflowing (even his toilet is full of books). His boss and colleagues consider him as an idiot, but this idiot can quote Hegel and the Daodejing. Hrabal not only saves books, but he also reads them - he thirsts after the great ideas and knowledge of the world. Saving books is his life. He is an obsessive collector of knowledge.

This novella is a strong protest against the banning and burning of books and the proscription of knowledge and freedom of thought – something unfortunately important again in our own harshly populist times. In that sense it has a lot in common with Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (the eponymous film by Truffaut is better than the book!).

But the times change even under a dictatorship: modern hydraulic presses are introduced which do the job better and more efficiently. For Hanta this means that all significance is taken away from his job and his existence. Finally, he commits suicide after being assigned to compact only clean paper...

Due to political censorship, this humorous short novel could not be officially published in the Czechoslovakia of the 1970s. Hrabal self-published it and had to wait until 1989 before it could be brought out in a normal edition.

Thanks to Hrabal's bawdy, witty humor, which infuses the whole book, reading this dystopian novella is unexpectedly great fun.

Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) was born in Brno when that Moravian city was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied law at the Charles University in Prague and took his degree in 1946. Hrabal worked in many jobs, such as stagehand, steelworker, postman, baler of wastepaper, dispatcher at a small railway station and insurance agent. These occupations provided rich material for his books when at age 49 he started writing. He wrote in an expressive style with often long sentences. Two of his most famous works are Closely Watched Trains, which gained an international audience both as a novel and as a film by Jiri Menzel, and the picaresque novel I Served the King of England. Together with Jaroslav Hasek, Karel Capek and Milan Kundera - likewise imaginative and amusing satirists - he is considered one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century. As a true successor to Jaroslav Hasek of The Good Soldier Švejk-fame, all his work is infused with an indomitable Czech wittiness.


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