Too Loud a Solitude
Ratings12
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings12
Average rating3.8
A fable about the power of books and knowledge, “finely balanced between pathos and comedy,” from one of Czechoslovakia’s most popular authors (Los Angeles Times). A New York Times Notable Book Haňtá has been compacting trash for thirty-five years. Every evening, he rescues books from the jaws of his hydraulic press, carries them home, and fills his house with them. Haňtá may be an idiot, as his boss calls him, but he is an idiot with a difference—the ability to quote the Talmud, Hegel, and Lao-Tzu. In this “irresistibly eccentric romp,” the author Milan Kundera has called “our very best writer today” celebrates the power and the indestructibility of the written word (The New York Times Book Review).
Reviews with the most likes.
Wonderful, succinct writing. Enjoy on a lazy afternoon, makes me want to check out closely watched trains for sure.
Alright, I get that this book was written in the full swing of post-WWII communist domination of Czechoslovakia, a time of tremendous censorship over an artistic people. Disclaimer: I am 50% Czech (but not, for the love of God, Slovak, my Grandmother used to say) and love names like Bohumil and Miroslav and Ludmila. The horrific beauty of the ultra-efficient waste-paper baler and its young, muscular workers was well-done.
I also get that the main character was a semi-autobiographical portrait of the author, who was also a bailer of waste paper and wrote the novel while subjugated to enforced temperance. So, why not find beauty in the days when one could drink with impunity at work, find secret ways to throw art into the world, to ponder the lives of mice and civil wars of sewer rats, to abscond with untold written riches? To all of these things, yes. But, there were many passages that were too much, like theJesus/Lao-tse interlude.
I'm glad that I read this Czech novella, but I'm not sold on reading further selections by the author. Perhaps, the other plebeian 50% of me just can't appreciate such heights.
