Too Loud a Solitude

Bohumil Hrabal is not a particularly well-known writer in the English-speaking world. While it would be wrong to call him unknown, his fame does not match that of fellow Czech Milan Kundera. Hrabal never won the Nobel Prize or another other literary award with a high profile in North America.
What with the incredible number of books in the world and the problems and vagaries of translation, there are probably a lot of authors that should be read but aren't. Hrabal is one of them, and Too Loud a Solitude is probably the best place to start. It's a short, stream-of-consciousness story that neatly showcases the best of Hrabal. Through his story of a man who works as a trash-compactor, Hrabal is able to showcase his gifts for relentless storytelling, off-beat philosophy and beautiful sentences.
Hrabal was not much of a political writer, which is probably why he was able to stay and work in Czechoslovakia after the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968. (Although he too was susceptible to having books banned, and much of his work was published illegally or semi-legally). Too Loud a Solitude is probably one of his more political works, certainly among those that have been translated into English. Hanta, the main character, has been compacting waste paper for 35 years. Included among that waste are books that the (unnamed) regime has banned. Often, Hanta collects those books and reads them, or takes them home. He sleeps under an enormous canopy of books that he sometimes worries will crush him.
There is certainly an element that is critical of book-banning regimes here; Hrabal demonstrates both the futility and the foolishness of this tactic. With a main character whose job is to destroy banned books but who actually reads them and therefore preserves them, there is a superficial resemblance to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, but the similarities don't run too deep. Bradbury's work is aggressive and loud in its point about the danger of losing books and the power of reading. Hrabal is more subtle; the book is funneled entirely through the point of view of Hanta, who is not politically oriented, and so there is nothing obvious with which to condemn the Communist government. Instead, any such conclusions must be inferred from Hanta's solitude, possibly a consequence of his inability to discuss his books or ideas with others.
Any conclusions from this main character, who also serves as the narrator, must be made carefully because it is difficult to know what to make of him. Hanta is what could be called a "wise fool"; he has read a lot, and has a lot of knowledge in his mind, but it is not clear he understands everything. He does not take baths or showers; when he yearns for the Greek ideal of beauty, he washes, perhaps, his neck. Hanta alternates between perceptive philosophy and bawdy, silly stories, often mashed right up against each other in Hrabal's free-flowing style.
Hrabal was a great admirer of Jaroslav Hašek, the author of The Good Soldier Švejk. Hrabal's style is similar, in that the stories come quickly and freely, but in Too Loud a Solitude I think he takes Hašek's style to a different level. Whereas Hašek let the stories spill out regardless of whether they worked or not, Hrabal's short novel focuses all that digression into a kind of rhythm. You are swept along with the ebb and flow of Hanta's thoughts, but before you drift away, you are brought back to the main track, slightly farther along than when you left it.
Hrabal, while obviously a literary man, also spent much of his time in pubs (he once met U.S. President Bill Clinton and Czech President Vaclav Havel at his favourite Prague watering hole). In Too Loud a Solitude he combines the high-mindedness of philosophy with the typical stories of the pub; his style, flowing from one disconnected story to the next, makes this work perfectly in the book. Hanta, the narrator, is someone with whom you're not quite sure what you're dealing with; he could be a genius, he could be an idiot, or he could fall somewhere in between. That adds an extra layer of distortion to passages like this:

As for me, with my unwitting education, when I lie falling asleep under my two-ton canopy of books, I see visions of Schelling and Hegel, who were born in the same year, and once Erasmus of Rotterdam rode up on his horse and asked me how to get to the sea. So I wasn't surprised when another two of my favorites showed up. Seeing them side-by-side, I realized for the first time how important their age was for an understanding of their teaching, and leaning through the flies' fandango in my wet, blood-soaked smock, I pushed first the green button, then the red button, and watched Jesus, an ardent young man intent on changing the world, rise up and take over Lao-tze's place at the summit, while the old man looked on submissively, using the return to the sources to line his eternity; I watched Jesus cast a spell of prayer on reality and lead it in the direction of a miracle, while Lao-tze followed the laws of nature along the Tao, the only way to learned ignorance.

The power of books, especially in a country that doesn't allow them full freedom, the combination of philosophy and fun plus the dream-like rhythm of the book make Too Loud a Solitude a very good book. What made it a great book, for me, however, was the quality of the writing itself. Rather than just describing the action, of which isn't that much anyway, Hrabal shows how great writing can itself infect the reader and show beauty. Early in the book, Hanta describes his method of reading, and it's one that could be used to describe reading this book:

Because 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.

Of course, since I read this book in translation, much credit should go to translator Michael Henry Heim. Hrabal is a notoriously difficult author to translate; he was apparently a master of using the Czech language in new and inventive descriptive ways. Here Heim has done a magnificent job of rendering Hrabal's work into English in polished, beautiful prose.
At only 100 or so pages, Too Loud a Solitude is not a long book, and one that can be digested quite quickly - although it will likely reward closer readings, or additional readings. It's certainly a worthy introduction to a man who was a major author.