"Too Loud A Solitude," by Bohumil Hrabal

    A strange but compelling short novel--98 pages in a small page format. You can read it is a couple of sessions. Hrabal is a Czech author, born in 1914. I haven't looked up the date of his death, but presumably he is no longer with us. Two other novels are mentioned on the book jacket--"Closely Watched Trains," (made into a film) and "I Served the King of England." I shall read them both when I can get hold of copies. "Too Loud a Solitude" was in the DC Public Library.
    I heard about the book on the New York Times Book Review Podcast, on which a couple of critics talk each week about the books they are reading, and one mentioned that he had read "this extraordinary book" in one sitting.
    The first person narrator has been--as he reminds us at the beginning of most chapters--"in wastepaper for thirty -five years," working in a cellar beneath a courtyard where paper waste is deposited. The waste comes down through a trapdoor, and Hant'a (the narrator) compacts it into bales with his hydraulic press. He rescues books from the waste and has accumulated in his apartment so many books that he has over two tons of them on shelves above his bed and in his lavatory--so many that when he sits on the loo, or sleeps in his bed, he often fears they will all fall down on him. And he reads a great deal from the books he rescues, and he is thus able to keep quoting sentences from a very wide variety of authors-- Kant to Hegel to Sartre to Lao-tse. His consumption of beer is prodigious, and one pub-crawl seems to involve every bar in central Prague.
    Memories play a large role in his inner life--he relates his relationship with a girl friend called Manca, who drops out of his life at one point and reappears much later living with an aged sculptor who is carving a marble statue of her in his garden. He relates how his uncle--a railway signalman sets up a railway and a signal-box in his garden after he retires. And he remembers the little gypsy girl, with whom he flew a kite, and who would curl up in bed with him--and he speculates which concentration camp she might have died in. But this only scratches the surface of the inner monologue as Hanta discovers that there is a new, hugely efficient, hydraulic baling system that has been built, run by an efficient team of young workers, that will bring his thirty-five year career to an end.
    This is a book where I have taken pleasure in going back in and re-reading chapters.