Bohumil Hrabal, "Too Loud a Solitude"

 – ebook. Translated from the Czech by MICHAEL HENRY HEIM

Read from 20^th to 24^th of August 2018

My rating: 

The Last Reader

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera says that the aesthetic ideal of a world so embarrassed by shit that it tries to forget its existence, is kitsch: “Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.”

On the other hand, Goethe gives to sun only the right to have spots and this quote is used as the motto of Bohumil Hrabal’s disturbing novella, Too Loud a Solitude. In other words, as long as we cannot supply the brilliance, we are guilty of any shadow we cast and responsible for any misfortune befalls us.

As responsible as the narrator Haňťa is, either for the shit life finds fit to serve him with or the books he has made a career out of destroying. For he has spent his last thirty-five years in a cellar, receiving condemned books, and even though he tried to save as many as he could (until his house was overflowing with them), he went on and executed all he couldn’t save, by compacting them in enormous bales that in his own estimation could have filled three barns.

Rare books perish in my press, under my hands, yet I am unable to stop their flow: I am nothing but a refined butcher.

The rustle of torn pages accompanies his present and his past, his reality and his dreams, in other words the inner and outer life of a hero who is nevertheless so addicted to reading that the act itself is more than just reading, is a orgy of the senses, a synesthetic feast:

… when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

It is by drinking words (and often also beer) that Haňťa tries to forget that the outside life is (literally) crappy, either in a comic or in a tragic way. Indeed, there is a refined sense of comedy in the description of how his first love turned to shit when his girlfriend Manča unknowingly dipped her ribbons into a “pyramid of feces” while going to the tavern latrine, then returned and began to dance, splashing the other dancers “with the centrifugal force of her ribbons”. 

On the contrary, there is a sad remembrance of the tragedy of all destinies broken by communism in the tragi-comical story of his best friends who, from members of Academy of Science, became sewer workers and amused themselves by studying the rate, quality and consistency of the excrement flux under Prague. Here is the completion of Milan Kundera definition: shit may be divorced from kitsch, but is happily married with life, which can be shittingly kitschy. 😊

 

And if life is shit why not, at least till you die, make fun of gods by sacrificing them larger than life books, books pulsating with life, bleeding books that refuse to shut up even when compressed into enormous bundles past recognition?

One afternoon the slaughterhouse people brought me a truckload of bloodstained paper and blood-drenched boxes, crate after crate of the stuff, which I couldn't stand, because it had that sickly sweet smell to it and left me as gory as a butcher's apron. By way of revenge I piously placed an open Praise of Folly by Erasmus of Rotterdam into the first bale, a Don Carlos by Friedrich Schiller into the second, and, that the word might be made bloody flesh, an Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche into the third.

However soon, Haňťa feels, all will be over. In fact the book Apocalypse has already begun: a gigantic press has replaced the one he had maneuvered for thirty-five years, he himself has been replaced by a “Brigade of Socialist Labor”, consisting of some honest young people who know nothing about Plato or Goethe but everything about efficient work, and who won’t take responsibility for the destruction of books because they have 

no feeling for what the book might mean, no thought that somebody had to write the book, somebody had to edit it, somebody had to design it, somebody had to set it, somebody had to proofread it, somebody had to make the corrections, somebody had to read the galley proofs, and somebody had to check the page proofs, print the book, and somebody had to bind the book…

Furthermore, even children are taught now how to kill the defenseless books, by discarding the jackets and tearing the pages, under the supervision and with the encouragement of their teachers for whom books are only disposable, inanimate objects, not enlivened ones, resignedly waiting their turn in the slaughter house. 

Disorientated, left without his job and exiled from his cellar, Haňťa finds the only way to reconcile Borges’s heaven and Bradbury’s hell: sharing his books fate, burying himself amongst them, becoming himself more than a hero in a book, but the Book: 

 …I will follow Seneca, I will follow Socrates, and here, in my press, in my cellar, choose my own fall, which is ascension, and even as the walls press my legs up to my chin and beyond, I refuse to be driven from my Paradise, I am in my cellar and no one can turn me out, no one can dismiss me. A corner of the book is lodged under a rib, I groan, fated to leave the ultimate truth on a rack of my own making, folded in upon myself like a child's pocket knife...

…And now you too, reader of the last reader, can close the final book.