Too Loud a Solitude

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Average customer rating 5 (4 comments)

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Goodness, what a phenomenal little book this is. Powerful with so few words. Thoughtful, philosophical, touching, funny, and ultimately tragic. But though tragic, the conclusion makes perfect sense in light of the preceding narrative, and the narrator gains a fate which is greatly preferable to the unpalatable alternative that he otherwise faced. The book has shades of Knut Hamsun (the solitary, intellectual, reality-challenged narrator of Hunger), George Orwell (the stubborn permanence of the written word, a la 1984) and Franz Kafka (inhuman bureaucracies and the overall surreal tone), three writers whom I greatly admire, a list to which I now add Bohumil Hrabal. During my life I've only re-read a handful of books, but Too Loud a Solitude is one I will definitely be returning to, and probably more than once.

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This slim novel comes from a bright mind. Nothing in it can be predicted. It is full of filth, shocks of beauty and enormous energy. It covers the entire range of human passions without judgment. It is mind-expanding and truly invents, in the most reserved and elite sense of that word. There is nothing comparable.

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Simply a beautiful story. It grabs you on the first line and lets you down easily on the last.

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Though brief, this is a powerful, compelling book. The details of the paper recycler's life and art are vivid and will remain with me. Hrabal focuses not only on books but also on the motivation and obsession of the worker/artist and society's response to them. The book is symbolic on so many levels.