Too Loud a Solitude
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List Price:
$11.00
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$8.80
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Manufacturer: Harvest Books
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 891.8635
EAN: 9780156904582
ISBN: 0156904586
Label: Harvest Books
Manufacturer: Harvest Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 112
Publication Date: 1992-04-27
Publisher: Harvest Books
Studio: Harvest Books
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Editorial Reviews:
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Hantá rescues books from the jaws of his compacting press and carries them home. Hrabal, whom Milan Kundera calls “our very best writer today,” celebrates the power and the indestructibility of the written word. Translated by Michael Henry Heim.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Minor, interesting
Comment: After several false starts, I finally read Too Loud a Solitude in just two days (98 breezy pages). It is by Bohumil Hrabal, the Czech author of Closely Watched Trains. I don't know too much about Czech literature or culture, and I didn't know Hrabal was the author of Trains, but when I was reading this I felt a striking similarity to the film version of Closely Watched Trains; why exactly? not the plot, or even the style exactly (I haven't read Trains), but something cultural, there is no other word--something about the sense of humor and the slightly exaggerated, almost fantastic but just pointed enough to be real, characterization. Something both intanglible and deifnite.
Too Loud a Solitude is about a book and wastepaper compactor called Hant'a. It is written in the first person, and consists of Hant'a describing his job and his love of books and specific authors and painters (he decorates his "bales," the compacted product he produces in his basement room, with paintings by famous masters and secrets an intact book in their center before shipping them off), digressing into his biography and the character of his uncle, an old girlfriend, and a gypsy girl whose he slept with but whose name he can't remember, and commenting in lurid terms about the sewer system of Prague. It contains almost no dialogue, repeats phrases and encounters, and could be described as a rant, although a humorous and at times light-hearted one. The overall tone is that world-weary, tragi-comic, pessimistic but humane and far from grim voice so peculiar to Eastern Europe. Hant'a's job (destroying books and knowledge) could easily have been presented in oppressively symbolic terms, but fortunately Hrabal for the most part avoids a simplistic symbolic condemnation of a Soviet dominated culture--certainly the book can be read and interpreted on a primarily symbolic level, but it can also be enjoyed for other reasons, and on other levels. I specifically was struck by the fact that it is World War II, and the Nazis that still loom largest in the imagination and nightmares of the region, and think that in retrospect the era of Soviet domination will come to look positively benign compared to the crimes of Germany.
I largely enjoyed the book, but found its stylistic repetition a little tiring, and found myself wanting to get through the book pretty quickly and not in the best way. That is, I wanted to be able to say that I had read it, but did not actively enjoy the reading of every page. Still, there were numerous incidents and turns of phrase that made me laugh or take a second look. As an overtly literary product of a 20th century Eastern European country, I could not help comparing Hrabal as I was reading to Bruno Schulz, and although this is far from fair, Hrabal is so obviously inferior to Schulz as a stylist and a psychologist that I found myself not taking the book as seriously as I might otherwise have.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Grand Message
Comment: I was, at first, taken in by the unusual character and flavor of this book, but was later repulsed by the author's continuous references to blood and excrement. A scene I read quite late at night involved the main character and waste compactor, Hantá, compacting several slats of refuse dropped off by a slaughter house. Hrabal's descriptions of the sight and smell of discarded bodily fluids were too much for my imagination. At first, in almost complete willingness to give up on Hrabal, I read previous one-star Amazon reviews, tending to agree with the oft stated, "the book seems padded." Before reviewing these statements, I also pondered whether or not Hrabal spent considerable time researching specific quotes from his own home book collection (including references from art history books), seeking content to fill his novella with profundity.
Regardless of Hrabal's possible potential plans to swiftly stuff pages with meaningful excerpts about various intellectual topics, my awareness of the subtler ideas at play within Too Loud a Solitude, gradually pieced together while reading a few higher ratings. It may be that the numerous references to the aforementioned esteemed artistic works serve as tiny skeletal frames of Hantá's former artistic and intellectual dreams. In essence, their existence props up his otherwise lifeless body, enabling him to endure a dull life of hardship and disappointment.
As many critics suggest, Hrabal's prime intention is to expose the wiles of a totalitarian state, while laying bare the wounds of those ensnared in its political wire fence. The reader witnesses the meaningless work and mind numbing drinking habits of a man who is intellectually curious with no real intellectual outlet--a quirk characteristic of many haunted souls introduced through Hantá's daydreams about people he socializes with. His colleagues live in exile from their previous thinking lives--lives oppressed by the state that threatens the very existence of intellectual discourse.
Each character must create a sense of self-worth while facing the mundane worthlessness of meaningless jobs, and most workers are grateful to tears when someone relates to their plight. Many folks see Hantá as an innocent dreamer overcome by his ordinary, unforgiving job, but his intolerable boss has little sympathy for Hantá's lazy working habits and soporific character. The boss, as the embodiment of the regime, is shallow and insensitive, constantly harassing Hantá for his quiet, thoughtful ways.
The final analysis should be left to future readers, because I refuse to spoil the plot. In the end, I warmed up to this author's message, though I give it four stars as a caveat for anyone with a weak stomach.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Waste Not, Want Not
Comment: Is this novel (really a novella, but one with the reach and stretch of a novel) a parable? Or a portrait of man whose reality, while banal and even oppressive, is transformed by his mind and the language of his conversations with himself into an intense, hallucinatory way of life? Perhaps it's both. Hant'a, the man in question, stands, like an archetypal being - half beast, half angel -- with his feet in the mud and his eyes on the stars. And sometimes his feet sink even lower, into excrement. There is a recurring excremental theme throughout the book - accidents with human waste have determined the sad course of his earliest love-affairs; he descends from the basement where he works into an even lower world, that of Prague's sewer system, where he reflects upon an unending war between two tribes of sewer rats, each of which wishes to dominate the world of human evacuations; and, like a man idling by a babbling stream in the countryside, he sometimes relaxes by attending to the gurgle of water carrying waste through the drain-pipes connected to the sinks and toilets of the building where he works.
Or is Hant'a one of Hrabal's several "village simpletons"? In this case he would be a simpleton with vast intellectual ambitions (to understand the world as the greatest philosophers have), ambitions that are possibly beyond his abilities and opportunities. Which, of course, does not stop his flowing commentaries on the life around him, expressed in language that is vivid and colloquial, and in which one story reels in another and memories are like dreams with their strange transformations and fluidity.
His own highly symbolic work (a job he lovingly holds for thirty-five years) deals with another line of waste. Hant'a operates an old machine which shreds, mulches and compacts waste paper, including pristine books which will never be read because the State has banned them or because his fellow men are uninterested in their contents. Within each bale of compacted writing, he places a book opened to a favorite passage as a token of this ritual sacrifice of human thought. And he decorates the exteriors of the baled wastepaper with salvaged Old Master's reproductions, which will give the world a glimpse of higher things, beautiful things, as the bales are hauled away by truck and train.
While he rescues individual copies of books (and literally builds a castle of them within his two-room flat, a castle which threatens to collapse and crush him), he knowingly but sadly obliterates whole villages of mice who dwell in the ramshackle wastepaper kingdom which is constantly being assembled and disassembled in his basement workshop. He also crushes vast air-forces of metallic flies who assault him as he processes blood-soaked wrapping paper from butchers' shops, noting their busy blood-lust even as the closing jaws of the steel press are about to end their world. It's hard, dirty work which raises a thirst. While he constantly downs pitchers full of beer at his labors and on his way to and from work, he also thirsts for knowledge as much as he thirsts for beer, pausing to ponder gemlike sentences from the books he has destroyed and rescued. As he nears his retirement age he plans to buy his old work-press and move it to the countryside, where he will continue to compact wastepaper into artfully contrived bales which will be exhibited to the public, educational waste. He and the machine have merged their identities.
The knowledge he has accrued by reading discarded books is of a peculiar kind; it is almost entirely philosophical, metaphysical, or mystical (he cites the following with admiration: Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Novalis, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus ... and others). He hardly mentions the destruction of poetry or fiction. He gloats over the shredding of Nazi books but laments the loss of the gilt-stamped, leather-bound volumes of the Prussian State library. When he is working in a frenzy, refreshing himself constantly with beer and staring up at the sky through the hole above his head through which he is deluged with cascades of wastepaper, he has visions in which Jesus and Lao-Tze become his companions and engage in a sort of dialectical contest for the human soul and human possibilities as they are conceived during one's youth and then very differently during one's old age. And what about the gypsy girls who bring him wastepaper and then lounge about the basement, sharing his meals and beer and occasionally offering him sexual favors, which he politely declines because he is too busy with his machine or too preoccupied with his thoughts? Are they real? It's difficult to tell, for him as well as for us, the readers. They seem real enough, but a man who can summon up Jesus and Lao-Tze as companions can certainly summon up a gypsy or two. Everything about Hant'a's reality is intense and lurid, blending the everyday and the fantastic, from his dwelling through his workplace to his memories of his youthful life.
A most definite Reality intrudes in the form of a new generation of waste-compacting machines and waste workers - uniformed, efficient milk-drinkers (unlike his rather shabby self in need of a bath and smelling of beer and sweat) who never rescue a book or even open one to inspect its contents, because apparently they don't read; they have other leisure pursuits, more active and attractive pastimes; they are healthy socialist workers, hale and hearty in form and appetite but deficient in imagination and starved of intellectual nourishment. This new reality leads the demoralized Hant'a to a decision in which he escapes an intolerable situation through a ceremonial act that replicates and summarizes his whole life, an act which I will not describe here for fear of giving the reader something which he should discover on his own.
"Too Loud a Solitude" is autobiographical -- and self-exemplary -- to the extent that Hrabal's numerous years as a manual laborer (including a stint as a wastepaper compacter) were not a "waste" of his own aptitudes; here, as in other of his works, he has turned the dross of toil and everyday language into something quite valuable. The translation by Michael Henry Heim is excellent, conveying the language of a man who is in a constant state of rapture even as he sinks in despair. And, as a paper product, the book is very compact. Save it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I've learned that the heavens are not humane, neither the heavens nor any man with a head on his shoulders
Comment: If you are an avid reader of quality literature, you are bound to devour this slim, intelligent book in one reading. More so if you are familiar with the work of Novalis, Nietzsche, Lao-tze, Hegel, Holderlin, Rimbaud, Goethe, van Gogh, Schiller, Kant, Schopenhauer, and other writers, philosophers, and artists to whom Hrabal refers in this unusual, surreal novel. The protagonist (Hanta) is a man with a brilliant mind, living in voluntary solitude, compacting wastepaper and books by day (saving as many rare, condemned books as he can), and drowning the inhuman nature of the world in beer at all times (the fate of many brilliant, yet "politically inconvenient" people during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia). You need to know nothing about the Czech history or the communist regime to dive into this story (believe me, you will!) and appreciate Hrabal's intelligence, empathy, and black (at times absurd) sense of humor. Hanta's thoughts and experience will reach deep inside you, and shake up your beliefs. This is a man who believes that "neither the heavens are humane nor is life above or below - or within me", knowing that "I am not alone, that there are thousands like me in Prague working underground, in basements and cellars, and that they have live, living, life-giving thoughts running through their heads." Most of all, a man who knows that "I can be by myself because I am never lonely, I'm simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me." Hrabal's language is extremely intelligent and absorbing, the whole book reads like a long prose poem. The ending will take your breath away.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Regressus ad originem
Comment: The main character in this book compacts waste paper and banished books before they are burned. For him, it is a hell of a job, because he considers that books are 'human beings' and that burning books equals the Auschwitz crematorium.
'Heaven is not humane', but at least he tries to be humane by saving the most valuable books.
But even the 'battle of the rat clans' (class struggle) cannot prevent that his job is replaced by a big impersonal industrial press, which crushes indifferently all paper.
The individual crafsman dreams his worst nightmare: the gigantic press pulverizes the whole city and its culture. Mass production equals mass destruction. Progressus ad futurum becomes regressus ad originem.
This book was a very clever attack on censorship in Hrabal's homeland Czechoslovakia under communist rule.
This is a very original and humane book.
Highly recommended.
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