It's hard to think of an occupation much less sympathetic to a modern reader than a book burner. Although we now have more books than anyone could ever hope to read in a lifetime, many of them worthless and unlikely to ever be read again, the idea of tossing a single Harliquin or Twilight into the garbage--let alone burning them--is one that turns stomachs and attracts rude looks, even among those who don't actually read much. And this is for good reason, as both history and our literature have hammered ideas into our heads--books are dangerous, books are powerful, books can change the world, books are an unmitigated good. There's truth to all these and yet it's hard not to look around and wonder just how, in a world saturated with print, half of the country denies climate change, systemic racism, pandemics, and misogyny even exist.
Hanta is a destroyer of books, a horseman of the apocalypse trapped in a basement with a press that destroys books banned by the governemnt. He's not proud of the work he does, because he loves books, but he does take pride in the work itself, both by opening books to meaningful passsages and placing them at the center of the bales before compressing them, and by absconding with volumes of interest, especially those of philosophy, poetry, and art, and reading pages between cycles of loading and compacting bales. His house is a deathtrap, piled high with his ill-gotten library, and he falls asleep at night listening to the creaking and rustling of the stacks precariously balanced over his head, waiting for the day when they'll collapse and bury him.
The metaphor is dense and perhaps a bit obvious but Hrabal makes it light while also increasing the philsophical complexity as the book goes on. The book's treatment of Hanta is complex and surprising, using him both to articulate the power of art and literature while simultaneously using him as an object lesson to puncture the myths around them. The only other reader in the book is a professor who receives banned books from Hanta. He speaks eloquently of them but can't tell that Hanta's "boss", to whom he pays a weekly stipend, is only Hanta in a fake moustache. And Hanta himself, well, he's learned and speaks beautifully about the contents of his purloined books, but he's an empty, lonely man, envying the community of the mice that live in his stacks and futilly devoted to his ex-lover, an accident-prone woman named Manča. In spite of the wisdom of the page, he's far less happy than the socialist youths who cheerfully demolish books at 1000x his speed and never once concern themselves with the contents, or the Romani girls who visit him and offer him the pleasures of the flesh (he declines).
As the book winds down, Hanta finds himself dispossesed, fired from his job and divested of his press. Depleted, he makes one more attempt to find Manča. He succeeds, finding her in the courtyard of a sculptor who's immortalizing her in stone. He has an epiphanic moment:
I could see with my own eyes that Manča, who had always hated books, who had never in her life read a book through except to lull herself to sleep, was ending her earthly days as a saint... Manča had unwittingly become what she never dreamed of becoming, she had gone farther than anyone I’d ever known. I, who had constantly read books in search of a sign, never received a word from the heavens, while she, who had always hated books, became what she was meant to be,
The moment does in fact awaken him to the emptiness of his life, but there's a sense in which the reader, if moved by this moment--I was--is particpating in the cognitive dissonance at the heart of the story. If books and art are meaningless, why do they move us at all? For that matter, in what sense has Manča arrived, if she is being immortalized as a statue? Hrabal is communicating something slippery and unsentimental about art here, something almost inarticulable, and Hanta's final act, the only one that seems reasonable, is to make himself a work of art, the only art he has ever had a hand in creating, by climbing inside his machine and pushing the green button, opening himself at the center of the wasteheap we call art.
Not until we're totally crushed do we show what we are made of.
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