TOO LOUD A SOLITUDE

by Bohumil Hrabal ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1990

From Czech writer Hrabal (Closely Watched Trains; the irrepressible and serio-comic I Served the King of England): another melancholy but movingly buoyant tale about life under communism, this time in a charming, intelligent, and slim little (ca. 80-page) allegory about a man and books. For 35 years, without holidays, narrator Hanta has labored in a cellar room in Prague, compacting tons of the nation's wastepaper and forming it into bales to be hauled off for recycling. And for those same 35 years, Hanta has not only lovingly saved whatever books and artworks have turned up in the huge loads of trash (his bedroom is crowded with them, groaning dangerously under their weight), but he has also been unable to keep himself from reading them: with the result that while's he's merely an uneducated garbage-man, he's also a walking repository of learning from Erasmus to Kant, Nietzsche to Lao-tse, Plato and Seneca to Lindbergh and Jackson Pollock. Symbols fly every which way as the bedraggled and begrimed Hanta--often bloodied top to toe from handling vast loads of used butcher's-paper--meditates upon the meaning of his archival work under the ancient foundations of Prague, himself becoming a philosophic artist, carefully fashioning masterworks of compacted trash, ""making up wastepaper bales, a classic philosopher in the heart of each bale."" But the message here--about the doomed attempt to prevent a culture from destroying its own soul--never itself becomes for a moment programmatic, rigid, or lifeless: pathos and a symbol-enriched hilarity accompany Hanta's memories of his youth, of the deaths of his mother and of his uncle--and particularly of his ineffably touching love affair with a young gypsy girl who is destroyed by the Nazis. Hrabal's robust and sensitive inventiveness draws on masters of satire from Voltaire to Kafka to Beckett in a cry from the heart as culturally timely now as ever. Small, deft, moving: simply quite wonderful.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1990

ISBN: 0156904586

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1990

Categories: FICTION