Too Loud A Solitude, Bohumil Hrabal
The thing about a 90-page book like this one is that you are done as soon as you begin, and then it hits you that the beginning and the end are the same door through which all being, all time passes. You see a dog chasing its own tail, the mandible and tail bone locked in eternal combat.
And that curious, glorious dog here is Haňťa, master compactor of waste paper, connoisseur and high priest of the printed word. The book is his deity, the hydraulic press his sanctum sanctorum.
Haňťa has been compacting waste paper in a cellar for 35 years, and he believes that this is not a menial, mindless job, but requires a consciousness, a certain sensitivity for literature, philosophy, theology and psychology. No two pieces of paper are alike.
Haňťa has been compacting waste paper for 35 years, and he proclaims this fact at the beginning of almost every chapter and paragraph. All he's trying to tell you is that he has compacted everything, from blood-soaked tissue papers from the butcher's to Seneca, Sartre and Camus from the Royal Prussian Library. No two pieces of paper are alike. Some are soaked with the life and blood of the slaughterhouse, while some are soaked with the life and blood of prophets and philosophers.
Haňťa has been compacting waste paper for 35 years, and he'll tell you how he has been educated by the spirits of prophets and philosophers who visit his humble cellar. Their spirits are summoned no doubt by the abetting spirits of beer and rum, but Haňťa will say that the spirits are very much real, the education is very much real.
His boss will tell you he's a beer-soaked, daydreaming, unproductive idiot, but Hanta will beg to differ. He will tell you how he had paused only to pull out a book from the jaws of a brutal, unnecessary death, and he had paused only a little longer to reflect on its ephemeral form and enduring beauty.
He has converted his own house into an ark for these precious beings. If you are lucky, he might show you around. And if he's in the mood, Haňťa might talk about his time in the war, about gypsy girls and lost loves, and about the beautiful absurdity of a loud, precious solitude.
