Hrabal Too Loud a Solitude

About Too Loud a Solitude

Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude (1976) is a 100-page masterpiece of Czech literature — a lyrical novel in which Haňt'a, who has spent thirty-five years compacting waste paper in a hydraulic press in Prague, becomes the unlikely guardian of condemned books: Hegel, Lao-tzu, Schopenhauer, rescued from pulp and hidden at home. Circulated in samizdat during the Communist 'normalization' period, it is simultaneously a portrait of one man's eccentric wisdom and a profound meditation on what happens to culture under a totalitarian system that burns books rather than acknowledges them. Hrabal's prose style — long, breathless, tumbling sentences that mix the register of folk tale with philosophical aphorism — is one of the most distinctive in twentieth-century European fiction. Along with Closely Watched Trains (1965) and I Served the King of England (1971), it is one of the essential works of Czech literature.