Too Loud a Solitude

Hrabal reminded me that mere words can conjure up a storm. This tiny novella contains more intensity and depth than almost any other book that I can think of, except Kafka's Metamorphosis, which probably is its most illustrious direct predecessor. The fact that he engages that influence productively is a testimony of this writer's enormous sensibility and talent. Hanta is an old man who...more

Hrabal reminded me that mere words can conjure up a storm. This tiny novella contains more intensity and depth than almost any other book that I can think of, except Kafka's Metamorphosis, which probably is its most illustrious direct predecessor. The fact that he engages that influence productively is a testimony of this writer's enormous sensibility and talent. Hanta is an old man who works as a recycler. In the depths of a building in the middle of Prague, he struggles daily at his small press, feeding it the trash that is discharged at his facility and pressing it into blocks. But he is no normal recycler. He is, as he puts it, a "forcefully educated man". He is obsessed with reading the books that he occasionally finds mixed with the trash. When he is done with one of them, he puts it in the press and creates a special block for it, an act from which he derives a surreal and yet moving pleasure. Sometimes he endeavors to cover the blocks of trash with famous pictures; he does a Van Gogh series, a Klimt series. Sometimes he rambles on and on about the colonies of rats that surround him when he works. Sometimes he has visions of Nietzsche or Christ. Just at the moment when the character is starting to seem too odd to be believable, we learn about his past and understand that he is one of us; his strangeness is the imprint of his life, he is irredeemably human. From that moment on the book takes flight, and pulls us relentlessly towards its illuminating end. I wish that there were fewer self-obsessed geniuses and more actual writers, like Hrabal, in the world. I had almost forgotten the burning sensation of being told the truth about the human condition.   hide

Before reading this book, how can you imagine that only one single character can tell such an overwhelmingly powerful story! But the after effect is: I frequently think of committing suicide in the subsequent three years.

A "happy ending" for worms...and rats.

Love this book.