Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal

For thirty-five years now I've been in wastepaper, and it's my love story. For thirty-five years I've been compacting wastepaper and books, smearing myself with letters until I've come to look like my encyclopedias--and a good three tons of them I've compacted over the years. I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me. My education has been so unwitting I can't quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from books, but that's how I've stayed attuned to myself and the world around me for the past thirty-five years. Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

The narrator of Bohumil Hrabal's slim meditative novel Too Loud a Solitude has been working for thirty-five years us, as he tells us at the beginning of each chapter, in wastepaper. His job is to take old books and documents deposited through a hole in the ceiling of his cellar shop and crush them into bales for disposal. When he finds an old book, he reads through it first, perhaps taking it home, or perhaps placing it at the heart of a certain bale like a seed of precious unattended knowledge. Though he is a laborer, he's become infused with all the things he has read: Schopenhauer, the Talmud, Erasmus, Nietzsche. These things are not just contained within him, but are him--he is a "jug filled with water both magic and plain," in that lovely image.

Too Loud a Solitude is only 100 pages long, but it has the same kind of picaresque and unconnected quality as Hrabal's novel I Served the King of England. The episodes, remembered or immediate, have a precious and absurdist quality: there's the professor who digs through the wastepaper who thinks the wastepaper man, Hanta, is a different person when he sees him in the square from when he sees them in the cellar; the great bale-crusher Hanta contemplates in fear, John Henry like, that it will replace him. One of my favorite of Hanta's memory is about an old girlfriend who just, for some reason, can not stop accidentally appearing in public with errant poop on her ribbons or her shoes. A sweeter version of that story is about a beautiful Gypsy girl who appears on Hanta's doorstep and moves in without speaking, and who is eventually taken away and destroyed by Nazis.

In I Served the King of England, Nazism is a surprise; it happens to the narrator suddenly and perplexingly as perhaps it happened to Europe. Here, it's little more than subtext, but it frames Hanta's character in an intriguing way, I think. Is the destruction of Hanta's beloved works in the wastepaper baler meant to parallel the Nazi predilection for book burning? Is Hanta perhaps an image of the intellectual human spirit in which ideas thrive, even when books are destroyed? There is something, too, in the obvious contrast between Hanta's working class identity and his absorption of these great works, a collapse of our expectations about the working and intellectual classes. Hanta dreams that Jesus and Lao-Tzu are haunting his cellar; they become figures of the progressus ad futurum and the regressus ad originem, the march to the future and the return to the past. How do these competing conceptions of time and futurity capture the schizophrenia of Europe in the 20th century? I think there's a lot lurking beneath the surface here.

Too Loud a Solitude is one of those books that dismisses expectations about genre: is it realist or absurdist? Comedy or tragedy? A novel or a story? I always admire the confidence in books like this, that don't want to be anything than what they are. The worst thing you can say about Too Loud a Solitude, I think, is that it's over too soon.