Too Loud A Solitude is by Bohumil Hrabal, the author of the celebrated Closely Watched Trains and I Served The King of England. This is a unique story about the resonance of the written word, art and knowledge.
Hanta has worked for thirty-five years compacting paper, a one-man operation built beneath the city courtyard, where any kind of printed material is fed through a hole in the ceiling to be baled for recycling. As he feeds the never-ending piles into the compacting machine, he weeds out classically bound books for himself, and in reverence, places into the middle of the bale an open volume (Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Nietzsche) along with whatever mice or flies are about the cellar. Recycled posters line the drums with artwork, wrapping each block in paintings by Van Gogh, Gaugin, or Brueghel before the wires secure it. All will be broken down in vats, from cheap flyers to the contents of the Royal Prussian Library, Nazi propaganda and blood-stains papers from the slaughterhouse - even piles of unused clean white paper.
Spending his off time drinking, he dreams of past loves and gypsy girls. His plan of buying the machine for his own use in retirement may not come to pass, as he witnesses new, larger, mass compacting presses automatonically manned by clean, white gloved crews.
Hanta is an old recluse - apart from modern society but connected to life by his encyclopedic knowledge of the great thinkers. I might get a deeper reading if I understood more philosophy or Socialsim, but I do relate to his love of the physical books he saves and fills his apartment with, including stacks ominously teetering on a platform above his bed. Like characters in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Hanta has become not only a book, but a philosophic library. A unique read.
1976 / Tradeback / 98 pages
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