Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabal

A sad book about totalitarianism!

This book’s narrator operates a hydraulic press in a cellar room, compacting the wastepaper that is dropped on his head through a hole in the ceiling–sometimes blood-soaked wastepaper from the slaughterhouse, which comes covered in biting flies.

Every time the narrator, Haňt’a, finds a rare book among the waste paper, he stops working to read it. Then he seeds the center of each bale with a book–”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”--and wraps the outside in copies of, say, Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait at the Age of 63, from the fifteen hundred pounds of Old Masters reproductions that were dropped into his cellar the month before. His bales are his artworks, he says, and when he is retired he will buy his hydraulic press, set it up in his uncle’s garden, and invite the public to come and try making their own bales.

I read this book a while ago and it stood out in my mind, although this was more of a feeling than a specific memory of what made it special. I remembered that it was faintly surreal and absurd (his apoplectic boss is always screaming down the hole about how slowly he works), and this made me feel it was unserious, that any emotional power it had was snatched out of the teeth of silliness.

I reread the book on the edge of tears the whole time. It’s a sad book about living under the Nazis and then the Communists, destroying books “in a land that has known how to read and write for fifteen generations.” Hrabal actually did work as a wastepaper compactor, and this story isn’t merely an allegory for censorship under Czechoslovakia’s Communist regime. But it isn’t not an allegory for living under censorship.

Haňt’a is living not only through an oppressive political regime but also, like all of us, through changing times, finding himself a relic who has lived on past his usefulness. A new paper-compacting plant has opened up, staffed by efficient young workers,

pulling covers off books and tossing the bristling, horrified pages on the conveyer belt with the utmost calm and indifference, with no feeling for what the book might mean, no thought that somebody had to write the book, somebody had to edit it, somebody had to design it, somebody had to set it, somebody had to proofread it, somebody had to make the corrections, somebody had to read the galley proofs, and somebody had to check the page proofs, print the book, and somebody had to bind the book, and somebody had to pack the books into boxes, and somebody had to do the accounts, and somebody had to decide that the book was unfit to read, and somebody had to order it pulped, and somebody had to put all the books in storage, and somebody had to load them onto the truck, and somebody had to drive the truck here, where workers wearing orange and baby-blue gloves tore out the books’ innards and tossed them onto the conveyer belt, which silently, inexorably jerked the bristling pages off to the gigantic press to turn them into bales, which went on to the paper mill to become innocent, white, immaculately letter-free paper, which eventually would be made into other, new, books.

Hrabal wrote the book in the 1970s and couldn’t publish it legally. So he read it out loud in bars to entertain his friends.¹ I can tell that, with every line, he was thinking about how they would react, and that he must have been very satisfied every time he got a laugh, or a sigh. It almost makes you wish you had been there.

1. https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-violent-insights-of-bohumil-hrabal