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.

I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

Here, in the Hotel Tichota, I also learned that the ones who invented the notion that work is ennobling were the same ones who drank and ate all night long with beautiful women on their knees, the rich ones, who could be as happy as little children.  I always used to think that the rich were damned, that country cottages and cozy little parlors and sour soup and potatoes were what gave people a feeling of happiness and well-being, and that wealth was evil.  Now it seemed that all that stuff about happiness in poor country cottages was invented by these guests of ours, who didn't care how much they spent in a night, who threw money to the four winds and felt good doing it.

Ditie is a waiter in one of the finest hotels in Prague.  The headwaiter tells him that the job of a waiter is to see everything and to see nothing--that is, to hone his powers of observation so that he might know each customer and serve them perfectly, but to be discreet about what he sees.  From his vantage point Ditie sees everything, coming to understand the wealth and power of sausage salesman, witnessing the childish love affair of the president of Czechoslovakia himself, but his keen eye is balanced by a boyish innocence and naivete.  Another waiter, who can anticipate everything a customer will order, always says his perspicacity comes from the fact that he once served the King of England.  And so Ditie, once decorated for his exceptional service to the visiting Haile Selassie, is able to say in moments of great vision, it is because I served the Emperor of Ethiopia.

I Served the King of England is a funny book, characterized by a lighthearted skewering of the wealthy as it follows Ditie from one hotel to another.  Its satirical tone is a step removed from reality, closer to something like a Wes Anderson movie than real life (and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that Anderson was thinking of this novel when he made The Grand Budapest Hotel).  But at the novel's midpoint, Ditie falls in love with a gym instructor who has accompanied invading Nazi forces, and the novel transforms from the picaresque into something more tragic and fraught.  Ditie is incensed by the way his hotelier superiors snub his fiancee, Lise, simply because she's German.  But at the same time, when he's prodded by Nazi doctors assessing whether he's "worthy of inseminating an Aryan vagina with dignity," he can't deliver a semen sample because he's too shaken by the image of his countrymen being executed by the Nazis.

Hrabal's version of occupied Czechoslovakia is a bloody farce.  His Nazis are obsessed with physical fitness; Ditie finds work at a ridiculous hotel designed to serve pregnant Teutonic women in preparation of the future master race.  He does something similar with the post-war Soviet occupation: Ditie emerges from the war as a hotel owner and a millionaire, but he's quickly thrown in prison for it.  He's delighted; in fact, Hrabal includes a funny scene where Ditie practically begs to be arrested simply so that the world will recognize his achievement and stature as a millionaire.  The prison itself is an extended joke, a kind of vacation resort where the millionaires rule the guards and the locked gate is unconnected to any wall.

I Served the King of England does a great job satirizing the place of Czechoslovakia in twentieth century history, but its most affecting scenes are smaller and more personal.  Ditie, disillusioned by the lack of satisfaction becoming a hotel owner and a millionaire have afforded him, takes a position mending roads in a remote mountain town.  Alone with a set of animals--a horse, a dog, a goat, and a cat--he is at last satisfied.  The townspeople find him after a snow storm in his old waiter's tuxedo and sash:

I invited them into the inn, and when they looked at me, I saw they were alarmed.  Where did you get that?  Who gave it to you?  How come you're dressed up like that?  And I said, Sit down, gentleman, now that you're my guests.  I used to be a waiter.  As though regretting they had come, they asked, What's that sash and that medal all about?  I said, I was given them many years ago, because I served the Emperor of Ethiopia.  And who are you serving now? they asked, still uneasy.  My guests, as you can see, I answered, and pointed to the horse and the goat, who had stood up and wanted out, butting their head against the door.  I opened it for them, and they filed out and walked down their corridor to the stable.  But my tuxedo and the sparkling medal and the blue sash upset the villagers so much that they just stood there.

I love this final image of Ditie, no longer dreaming about his future renown as a hotel owner, but resuming the life of service and humility, not for the powerful and the wealthy, but for a horse and a goat.  It's silly but also poignant, which is a great way of describing the power of I Served the King of England.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happend at all. If we only have one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

I started my review of Lolita by saying that I was really unqualified to talk about the book in any sort of meaningful way. It was dense, complex, often over my head, and completely enjoyable. I feel roughly the same way about The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The difference being that I didn't like it nearly as much as I liked Lolita. And in my way of thinking, the books do share some similarities. Both could be described as a novel of ideas. Both of their stories have a dreamlike quality to them. And both of the books deal with sex. Sex was the underlying theme of Lolita, however, it was Humbert Humbert's lust that was on display, not his acts of sex. But in Lightness, sex is front and center and standing at attention. While the book itself is about something much bigger, sex is the driving force behind much of the storyline.

The novel is set in Prague in the 1960s, around the time of the invasion by the USSR. Tomas is a highly successful Czechoslovakian surgeon who looses his job for not towing the line of the Communist Party. His wife Tereza is a politically active photographer. There are two secondary characters, Tomas's mistress Sabina and Sabina's married lover Franz. The story revolves around the intertwined lives of these four people.

I have been thinking about how to describe this book for a while now, and the best I can do is that it is a like a licentious fairytale. But while the inherent moral of most fairytales is that love conquers all, the moral of Lightness is that life is ephemeral. Take this passage in which Franz is trying to figure out if he should leave his wife for his mistress: "Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can only make one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions." If each of us only has only one life to live, then does not that life take on a certain degree of lightness? Kundera's characters have little epiphanic bursts throughout the novel where they seem to grasp -- or at least grasp at -- at this concept. It is when they are most happy, most content with there life. And why not? By its very nature this concept is not burdensome, but liberatingly light.