This book overflows with whimsy and daydreams, jostling trains of thought and far-flung learning, and all the sundry and specific joys of being fully human.
I knew a little of Hrabal before I read this. Two months ago, I saw a film of his book ‘Closely Watched Trains’. The film was well-shaped and drew me into its war-torn yet vibrant world, mingling several tones, with elements of romance, comedy light and dark, tragedy and political satire, all wrapped around a boy finding his way to manhood. Hrabal often looks into mishaps and catastrophes, but somehow stays open-hearted and resilient through it all. It’s as if he set his symphony in a minor key with poignant chords in the background, but offers so many lively and amusing bits of melody on top that I never lose hope. Maybe Hrabal explains his aim in the excerpt below: “If I knew how to write, I’d write a book about the greatest of man’s joys and sorrows.”
Hrabal is a natural storyteller with a style all his own. If I had to compare Too Loud a Solitude to another work, then his palette of genres, and how Hrabal blends them, reminds me somewhat of Catch-22.
Telling Second-Hand Stories
My favorite challenge as a reviewer, and my duty to you as a reader, is trying to capture the flavors of a particular writer in my own words. That’s a tall order in this case. Hrabal is a slippery fish, tricky to measure and summarize.
The surest way to capture the flavors of Too Loud a Solitude is to hand you its opening paragraphs to taste for yourself. Actually, I’ll start with its inner front-jacket blurb, to orient you:
The story of a man in a police state who loves books too much.
Haňtá has been compacting trash for thirty-five years. Every evening he rescues books from the jaws of his hydraulic press, carries them home in a suitcase, and fills his house with them.
There are two tons of books now on planks above his bed; books are even piled high over the toilet in his bathroom. Haňtá may be an idiot, as his boss calls him, but he is an idiot with a difference — able to quote the Talmud, Hegel, Erazsmus of Rotterdam, and Lao-tzu.
In this baroque and winsome tale, Czechoslovakia’s most popular writer celebrates the indestructibility of the written word.
And now let’s hear Hrabal’s own voice, and step into Haňtá’s world, in the opening 2½ long paragraphs of Too Loud a Solitude:
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 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 my 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. In an average month I compact two tons of books, but to muster the strength for my godly labors I’ve drunk so much beer over the past thirty-five years that it could fill an Olympic pool, an entire fish hatchery. Such wisdom as I have has come to me unwittingly, and I look on my brain as a mass of hydraulically compacted thoughts, a bale of ideas, and my head as a smooth, shiny Aladdin’s lamp. How much more beautiful it must have been in the days when the only place where a thought could make its mark was the human brain and anybody wanting to squelch ideas had to compact human heads, but even that wouldn’t have helped, because real thoughts come from outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, inquisitors burn books in vain. If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself. I’ve just bought one of those minuscule adder-subtractor-square-rooters, a tiny little contraption no bigger than a wallet, and after screwing up my courage I pried open the back with a screwdriver, and was I shocked and tickled to find nothing but an even tinier contraption — smaller than a postage stamp and thinner than ten pages of a book — that and air, air charged with mathematical variations. When my eye lands on a real book and looks past the printed word, what it sees is disembodied thoughts flying through air, gliding on air, living off air, returning to air, because in the end everything is air, just as the host is and is not the blood of Christ.
For thirty-five years now I’ve been compacting old paper and books, living as I do in a land that has known how to read and write for fifteen generations; living in a onetime kingdom where it was and still is a custom, an obsession, to compact thoughts and images patiently in the heads of the population, thereby bringing them ineffable joy and even greater woe; living among people who will lay down their lives for a bale of compacted thoughts. And now it is all recurring in me. Along with thirty-five years of pushing the red and green buttons on my hydraulic press, I’ve had thirty-five years of drinking beer — not that I enjoy it, no, I loathe drunkards, I drink to make me think better, to go to the heart of what I read, because what I read I read not for the fun of it or to kill time or to fall asleep; I who live in a land that has known how to read and write for fifteen generations, drink so that what I read will prevent me from falling into everlasting sleep, will give me the d.t.’s, because I share with Hegel the view that a noble-heartede man is not yet a nobleman, nor a criminal a murderer. If I knew how to write, I’d write a book about the greatest of man’s joys and sorrows. It is by and from books that I’ve learned that the heavens are not humane, neither the heavens nor any man with a head on his shoulders — it’s not that men don’t wish to be humane, it just goes against common sense. Rare books perish in my press, under my hands, yet I am unable to stop their flow: I am nothing but a refined butcher. Books have taught me the joy of devastation: I love cloudbursts and demolition crews, I can stand for hours watching the carefully coordinated pumping motions of detonation experts as they blast entire houses, entire streets, into the air while seeming only to fill tires. I can’t get enough of that first moment, the one that lifts all the bricks and stones and beams only to cave them in quietly, like clothes dropping, like a steamer sinking swiftly to the ocean floor when its boilers have burst. There I stand in the cloud of dust, in the music of fulmination, thinking of my work deep down in the cellar where I have my press, the one where I’ve been working for thirty-five years by the light of a few electric bulbs and where above me I hear steps moving across the courtyard, and, through an opening in the ceiling, which is also a hole in the middle of the courtyard, I see heaven-sent horns of plenty in the form of bags, crates, and boxes raining down their old paper, withered flower-shop stalks, wholesalers’ wrappings, out-of-date theater programs, ice-cream wrappers, sheets of paint-spattered wallpaper, piles of moist, bloody paper from the butchers’, razor-sharp rejects from photographers’ studios, insides of office wastepaper baskets, typewriter ribbons included, bouquets from birthdays and namedays long past. Sometimes I find a cobblestone buried in a bundle of newspapers to make it weigh more or a penknife and a pair of scissors disposed of by mistake, or claw hammers or cleavers or cups with dried black coffee still in them, or faded wedding nosegays wound round with fresh artificial funeral wreaths.
For thirty-five years I’ve been compacting it all in my hydraulic press, and three times a week it is transported by truck to train and then on to the paper mill, where they snap the wires and dump my work into alkalis and acids strong enough to dissolve the razor blades I keep gouging my hands with. But just as a beautiful fish will occasionally sparkle in the waters of a polluted river that runs through a stretch of factories, so in the flow of old paper the spine of a rare book will occasionally shine forth, and if for a moment I turn away, dazzled, I always turn back in time to rescue it, and after wiping it off on my apron, opening it wide, and breathing in its print, I glue my eyes to the text and read out the first sentence like a Homeric prophecy; then I place it carefully among my other splendid finds in a small crate lined with the holy cards someone once dropped into my cellar by mistake with a load of prayer books, and then comes my ritual, my mass: not only do I read every one of those books, I take each and put it in a bale, because I have a need to garnish my bales, give them my stamp, my signature, and I always worry about whether I’ve made a bale distinctive enough: I have to spend two hours overtime in the cellar every working day, I have to get to work an hour early, I sometimes have to come in on Saturdays if I want to work my way through the never-ending mountain of old paper. Last month they delivered nearly fifteen hundred pounds of “Old Masters” reproductions, dropped nearly fifteen hundred pounds of sopping-wet Rembrandts, Halses, Monets, Manets, Klimts, Cézannes, and other big guns of European art into my cellar, so now I frame each of my bales with reproductions, and when evening comes and the bales stand one next to the other waiting in all their splendor for the service elevator, I can’t take my eyes off them: now The Night Watch, now Saskia, here Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, there the House of the Hanged Man at Anvers or Guernica. Besides, I’m the only one on earth who knows that deep in the heart of each bale there’s a wide-open Faust or Don Carlos, that here, buried beneath a mound of blood-soaked cardboard, lies a Hyperion, there, cushioned on piles of cement bags rests a Thus Spake Zarathustra; I’m the only one on earth who knows which bale has Goethe, which Schiller, which Hölderlin, which Nietzsche. In a sense, I am both artist and audience, but the daily pressure does me in, tires me out, racks me, sears me, and to reduce and restrict my enormous self-output I drink beer after beer, and on my way to Husenský’s for refills I have time to meditate and dream about what my next bale is going to look like. The only reason I down so much beer is to see into the future, because in every bale I bury a precious relic, a child’s open coffin strewn with withered flowers, tinsel, and angel’s hair, and I make a nice little bed for the books that turn up unexpectedly in the cellar, much as I myself turned up there one day. That’s why I’m always behind in my work, why the courtyard is piled to the rooftops with old paper that can’t go down the opening in the ceiling of my cellar for the mountain of old paper blocking it from below; that’s why my boss, his face scarlet with rage, will sometimes stick his hook through the opening and clear away enough paper to shout down to me, “Haňtá! Where are you? For Christ’s sake, will you stop ogling those books and get to work? The courtyard’s piled high with paper and you sit there dreaming!” And I huddle in the lee of my paper mountain like Adam in the bushes and pick up a book, and my eyes open panic-stricken on a world other than my own, because when I start reading I’m somewhere completely different, I’m in the text, it’s amazing, I have to admit I’ve been dreaming, dreaming in a land of great beauty, I’ve been in the very heart of truth.
That speaks to the core of my self, to a deep and burbling thirst in my soul. I love Hrabal’s quicksilver meanderings, and how his reflections are so quirky and unexpected, yet always sympathetic and encouraging, “because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself.” He rarely travels in straight lines, but I stay curious and trust his ramblings.
In the next section, I’ll step sideways, and describe Too Loud a Solitude in my own words. But one purpose of a review is for you, the reader, to decide if you want to read the whole book. My advice is, if those paragraphs of Hrabal tickled your fancy, this book is for you; but if they didn’t, then it isn’t.
The end of that opening expresses a feeling all voracious readers share: true of Haňtá in his world of story; and of Hrabal, trapped in Czechoslovakia under an oppressive communist regime, who were censoring old books and new shoots of creativity; also true of me now, sitting in a cabin on a lake in Maine, nigh to paradise, with waves slapping the shore below and a reddening sun setting behind yonder pointed firs. We are each reading to escape our familiar mundane, to enter into the heart and mind of another, to absorb their truth into our imagination: “when I start reading I’m somewhere completely different, I’m in the text, it’s amazing, I have to admit I’ve been dreaming, dreaming in a land of great beauty, I’ve been in the very heart of truth.”
There’s an odd charm we discover, when a writer draws us in deeply and beguiles us with their voice. The communication is one-way, we only receive their story — yet we feel as though they hear and understand us too, as if we are sharing an intimate conversation with an old friend. For my single self, I found so much of that in Too Loud a Solitude.
My Favorite Challenge, and Duty to You
How would you explain Moby Dick to someone who had never opened it? You could tell them the plot, which covers the first several chapters, a few at the end, and lots of bits scattered through the middle. Then you could describe half a dozen major characters, starting with Captain Ahab, his nemesis Moby Dick, and Queequeg and Ishmael. There’s also a small encyclopedia about whales and whaling, interwoven throughout. But that adds up to less than half the book. All the plot, characters and whale-studies are scaffolding, from which Melville then takes flight in all directions: expressing the awe and dread with which his heart reflects life, the universe and everything; speaking in tongues and chasing fireflies as his love of language intoxicates him; pushing and twisting his text as he tries dozens of new shapes that chapters might take. Melville had a strong story and a wealth of knowledge and experience — then he poured his soul all over it, revealing depths Melville didn’t know he had in him.
Too Loud a Solitude is like that. Except Hrabal doesn’t turn his chapters into Shakespearean acts; instead he lets his sentences dance to their own rhythms, and his paragraphs expand to fill their long white containers. Hrabal has gathered a lot of books he read, personal memories, surreal stories and absurd hypotheses, then tossed them all into the large, loving trash compactor living in his skull. On the page, they look all jumbled together. But if you examine them, you’ll see that intense thought and craft went into shaping that jumble and organizing its threads — just as Haňtá did, in compiling his bales of trash-art. Threads pick up again pages later, characters and subplots develop, everything ripens in its own time, so that meanings and story emerge organically.
Still, it always feels spontaneous and a little precarious, as if you were sitting in bar beside your most eloquent professor, only he keeps drinking and digressing, till you get a little drunk from listening. His ramblings are littered with crystalline insights and poetic metaphors. Here are a few more moments I enjoyed, from the first quarter of Too Loud a Solitude:
- Mice playing in the trash basement, who Haňtá cares for — but accidentally kills many of, when the blind babies get lost in the hydraulic press, and their mothers jump in to be with them. Other mice who crawl into his clothes, then emerge later to scare waitresses and barmaids.
- The continual theme of books Haňtá squirrels home nightly: “Sometimes, when I’m careless enough to turn in my sleep or call out or twitch, I am horrified to hear the books start to slide, because it would take little more than a raised knee or a shout to bring them all down like an avalanche, a cornucopia of rare books, and squash me like a flea. There are nights when I think the books are plotting against me for compacting a hundred innocent mice a day”.
- Haňtá’s uncle who worked forty years as a signal man, “and when he retired he found he couldn’t live without a signal tower’, so he and his friends built a switching station from old tracks and trains in his backyard.
- ”My best friends are two former members of our Academy of Sciences who have been set to work in the sewers, so they’ve decided to write a book about them, about their crissings and crossings under Prague”. These friends teach Haňtá everything they inferred from observing excrement in the sewers, how they determined the sexual habits of Prague’s various neighborhoods from the prophylactics under each of them, and the history of the great war in the sewers, between a clan of white rats and a clan of brown, “the rat war to end all rat wars, and I knew it would end with a celebration lasting only till they could find a motive to start fighting again.”
You’ll find Too Loud a Solitude most congenial if you’re a bookish and curious sort, or a very patient listener. If you like what you’ve heard of Hrabal’s voice, this book is a fine place to start; it’s a lively ramble, just under 100 pages long.