Too Loud a Solitude

I am a part of a book club at work because otherwise I will never further my intellect, and instead choose only to watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Curb Your Enthusiasm and M*A*S*H on my computer, occasionally reverting to Dawson's Creek if I am feeling especially pathetic.

My book club is full of very intelligent and articulate people, which is a good thing because they are interested in reading "smart" books that I would have difficulty motivating myself to read otherwise. For instance, we are about to read Nabakov's Invitation to a Beheading, which fills me with fear and trembling, because reading Russian authors has never come particularly easily to me, and because Nabakov also wrote Lolita which I have always stereotyped as a book that only the smartest of smart people read.

It was recently my turn to choose a book and after getting a recommendation from a friend whom I perceive to be "smart" and "well-read," I suggested that we read Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. It's a tiny novel set in Communist Czechoslovakia, about Hantá, who has been compacting trash for thirty-five years. I was very afraid that no one, including me, would like it. But the others were mostly approving, and I adored this little book.

There isn't much point in me telling you the story since Wikipedia can do it better. Ultimately, you should just read the novel. But I will tell you why I loved this book and highly recommend it. Hantá, the trash-compactor, is such a pretty human being. He is more human than pretty. In fact, I spent much of the book asking myself whether Hantá is crazy. But there is something written into this character that is like us all, and that is beautiful. Whatever it is that unites humanity--whatever it is that each of us has in common deep underneath our livers, or hidden between neurons in our brains--Hrabal hits it. Hantá is crazy and beautiful and crippled and free, just like me, just like you. Somehow he manages to take us with him for a little while, and we peer into the life and mind of an old, drunken trash-compactor who is just like us.

My favorite part of the book was Hantá's reminiscings about a Gypsy girl he loved once. I resonated with her very intensely. I underlined line after line in that little section of the story. This beautiful Gypsy girl just steps into Hantá's life, uninvited and unexpected. She hardly speaks. She inserts herself into his house and his days and his nights without pretense. She keeps his pitcher filled with beer, his stove roaring with fire, and his bed alive and warm. It was as if they

"had been born together and never parted."

I think I love this Gypsy girl who never tells Hantá her name because I want to be like her in many ways. I want to live simply, to be content, to eat soup and bread and drink beer and stare into a fire and be calm. Hantá says this of her:

"My childlike little Gypsy, simple as unworked wood, as the breath of the Holy Spirit--all she ever wanted was...to feed the fire, make her potato goulash, and fill my large picher with beer, nothing more than to break her bread like the wafer at Communion and look into the stove door, transfixed by the flames and heat and noise of the fire, the song of the fire".

One of the things that is so remarkable about Hantá is how he discovers goodness in the mire of his life. In that way, I would like to be like Hantá as well. He compacts trash all day, surrounded by mice and flies, yet he is a collector of knowledge and a creator of beauty. He fills his mind with literature and art and then crafts his bales of trash into offerings, dedicating each to a concept or ideal or portrait. He is a trash compactor, and yet he is in love with his work. He witnesses the death of knowledge and living things all day, every day, and yet says,

"It never ceased to amaze me, until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I'd seen and been through, body and soul, in too loud a solitude, and slowly I came to the realization that my work was hurtling me headlong into an infinate field of omnipotence."

I think that sums up my affection for this book--I think the best days are the ones in which we recognize that we are beautiful and holy for having the courage to hold on to our sanity, and that we each are hurtling headlong into an infinate field of omnipotence.