Novel
Too Loud a Solitude
Příliš hlučná samota
Bohumil Hrabal · 1976
Synopsis
For thirty-five years, Haňťa has been pressing old paper and books destined for pulping in the bottom of a cellar in Prague. He saves the finest ones, reads them, finds himself educated in spite of himself, and turns each bale of paper into a work. Between the beer, the philosophers he quotes and the dreams of a retirement in which he would take his old press with him, he discovers a modernity that no longer needs him.
Context
The narrative, of which the author left three versions, one in verse and two in prose, first circulated in samizdat in 1976; it appeared officially in the country only in 1989. Hrabal drew there on his own work at the recycling centre, and his hero owes much to a colleague of that time, Jindřich Pojkrt. The French translation appeared with Robert Laffont in 1983, the English one in 1990.
Who it is for
A short narrative, about one hundred and twenty pages in French, in a continuous monologue where the same motifs recur, like a sonata.
Prizes and reception
The author said he had come into the world only to write this book; one of his best known, translated into more than a dozen languages.