Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Socialism Remaindered

Was Hrabal the Studs Terkel of Moravia? He and Terkel were more or less contemporaries. From similarly humble backgrounds, they both got law degrees. Both were blacklisted and censored for questionable patriotism. Both were famed raconteurs. Most importantly, both concerned themselves mainly with working people and their culture.

The difference of course is that Terkel, in his Working in particular, asks people about how their jobs gave positive meaning to their lives. Hrabal inquires more about how the roles people play are always ambiguously productive and destructive. For him, there is something of the symbolic and cosmic rather than the personal in each character. Perhaps this is the key to the difference in American and European moral sensibilities.

Too Loud a Solitude starts like one of Terkel's case studies, a first person account of a man dedicated for thirty-five to the waste paper compaction business. Well not quite. None of Terkel's subjects ever said anything like "If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself." This working stiff knows something about iconography and semiotics.

And not just about the books. Hrabal's characters themselves are like icons pointing beyond their immediate experiences: "When my eye lands on a real book and looks past the printed word, what it sees is disembodied thoughts flying through the air, gliding on air, living off air, returning to air, because in the end everything is air, just as the host is and is not the blood of Christ." No ordinary sanitary engineer then in his poetic vision and singular appreciation of the doctrine of transubstatiation.

The books in question, the primary raw material involved in the protagonist's production/destruction, are not allowed to become idols that inhibit their own transcendence. They possess a dialectical character for Hrabal as they bring both "ineffable joy and even greater woe." The protagonist, Hant'a, reinforces this realism; he is gnostic as well as Hegelian: "The heavens are not humane," he says, and "books have shown me the joy of devastation." Books are the centre of his existence, but they are nonetheless tainted and therefore not to be worshipped as divine.

I manage a small academic library, so I recognise the syndrome Hant'a demonstrates. He is constantly distracted from his duty to crush the books by the irresistible temptation to read the damn things. Not an efficient trait in either a librarian or a book compactor. The equivalent of a doctor's emotional involvement with her patient. Frequently dangerous. Always frowned upon. His addiction is controllable to the extent that he does fulfill his duties, if on occasion only barely.

But reading of the condemned books is only the entry level drug for Hant'a. Hard core addiction is bringing the space-eating things home. They quickly take over your life. And taking up all available house-space is only the half of it. The threat of death by book-avalanche is constant. As it is, Hant'a had already shrunk by a good four inches under the compressive weight of the books in his bedroom. The books are not merely a monkey on his back, they constitute the world he inhabits and that inhabits him.

Aside from a distinct preference for Schiller and Goethe, Hant'a's workaday world is not unlike many of Terkel's subjects. He's over-qualified for the job of pressing first the green button and then the red button; with a nag for a boss; and he drinks too much beer at lunch, and for that matter even on the job. By no standard can he be considered passionate or even interested in his job except for the unauthorised side-benefits. The job itself is irrelevant to Hant'a's identity, just as is his participation in a socialist state.

Hant’a’s fear of technological redundancy is, however, as real as that of one of Terkel's subjects in capitalist America. Ever since a gigantic new machine was installed in a neighbouring town, he knows his days in book-compacting are numbered. In fact he looks forward to retirement. But he desperately wants to bring his now surplus compactor home with him since he's not sure he can do without the daily routine of waste paper disposal. He's not worried about income in retirement, however, and certainly not the loss of social routine. The problem is where to source a reliable flow of good books!

Not Terkel then.

Postscript: just to demonstrate that truth is stranger than fiction, this little news piece from Turkey showed up in my ‘feed’: http://forreadingaddicts.co.uk/news/t...

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