Too Loud a Solitude
by Bohumil Hrabal.
Příliš hlučná samota (1976)
translated by Michael Henry Heim.
Abacus, 1993 (1990).
‘I looked up and realized that Jesus and Lao-tze had disappeared up the whitewashed stairs like the turquoise and velvet-violet skirts of my Gypsy girls before them, and looked down and realized that my pitcher was empty, so I stumbled up the stairs on all threes, my head spinning from too loud a solitude . . .’ — Chapter Four.
In Prague, in what is now the Czech Republic, Haňťa repeatedly reminds us at the start of almost every chapter that for thirty-five years he’s been working alone in wastepaper, compacting it down in a hydraulic press. It’s hard work manually transferring waste dumped down a hole into his place of work to a compactor, binding the resulting bales with steel bands and moving them prior to being shipped out.
But Haňťa takes a certain pride in his work, consuming copious amounts of alcohol to energise himself before taking discarded books of philosophy and religion home to read, inwardly digest, and store precariously in his apartment.
New technology however is insidious, insinuating itself in communist Czechoslovakia as elsewhere in the 1970s; what will Haňťa do when his bullying boss has had enough of this drunken employee and decides to modernise, making Haňťa redundant? From the vantage point of an introvert like Haňťa can solitude ever be too loud?
Continue reading “Head-spinning”
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