A definitive five star of a book. I don't know how I ended up discovering the writer and bought this book in India. I wish I knew of him when I went to Prague.
What stood out for me in this book is the polite, yet firm tug at what is modernization. Before, when Hanta works away at his little compactor slowly, he imagines retirement to be a time to do the same thing on his own machine but at his own pace and creating masterpieces of bales. Then the large compactor and its industrial workers who wear protective garments like gloves and take breaks are introduced and 'efficiency' is introduced. A similar theme of retirement is described with his uncle and friends who buy off a little engine and make rides for children. The pride in their work sentiment is so moving.

I think the book has a beautiful ending, it is sad, but the beauty is so intense, I hardly noticed the sorrow. And thats what beauty can be, even blind out sorrow. ( )

It's been a long time since I've read this, and it holds up. As with most of my beloved czech authors, I feel fortified a bit against the constant onslaught of our dysfunctional society. ( )

In this novella, protagonist Haňťa works in a paper disposal and compacting facility in Prague in the 1930s to 1970s. He holds a deep love for books and occasionally saves them from being destroyed. He is not highly educated but has expanded his knowledge by reading the books he has accumulated. His home is filled with great works of literature. When he visits a larger, more efficient paper processing facility, he sees the writing on the wall that his small facility will soon fade into the past. His drinking worsens.

For me, the best part of this book is the writing, with passages such as: “But just as a beautiful fish will occasionally sparkle in the water of a polluted river that runs through a stretch of factories, so in the flow of old paper the spine of a rare book will occasionally shine forth, and if for a moment I turn away, dazzled, I always turn back in time to rescue it, and after wiping it off on my apron, opening it wide, and breathing in its print, I glue my eyes to the text and read the first sentence like a Homeric prophecy; then I place it carefully among my other splendid finds.”

Hrabal elegantly expresses the joy that readers find in books: “And I huddle in the lee of my paper mountain like Adam in the bushes and pick up a book, and my eyes open panic-stricken on a world other than my own, because when I start reading I’m somewhere completely different, I’m in the text, it’s amazing, I have to admit I’ve been dreaming, dreaming in a land of great beauty, I’ve been in the very heart of truth.”

The book is about the finding beauty in simplicity. It is about solitude and the impact of change. It condemns the destruction of knowledge, which was prevalent at the time. It is sad, and I cannot say it was a particularly pleasant reading experience, but I appreciate its messages. I would not recommend it to anyone feeling depressed.
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Almost certainly the best novel about the Eastern European wastepaper recycling industry ever written. "Too Loud a Solitude" is a novelette that is by turns sad and pleasantly surreal, one of those little books where everything comes together beautifully and the author hardly wastes a sentence. We hear our narrator, the operator of a wastepaper press in Communist Prague whose work keeps him almost completely confined to a cellar, describe how he has spent his life both rescuing books and reducing them to pulp. At work, he's both voracious autodidact and sculptor, making sure that each of his bales has, for example, a great work of literature at its center or that its outside showcases some notable work of art. Even though it was published long before the Amazon Kindle was a gleam in Jeff Bezos's eye, "Too Loud a Solitude" is sort of a love song to the sheer physicality of books, paper, and the written word. People who are ideologically opposed to e-readers should enjoy it. It's not that our protagonist doesn't have deeply held opinions about the books he's known, it's that his treasured books also cause him to sweat, ache, and go through a few liters of beer a night. For a book about books, "Too Loud a Solitude" is often relentlessly, excruciatingly physical. We hear about the mice that infest our main character's cellar, about more than a couple of incidents involving unsavory bodily secretions, and about a lot of not-so-good-for-you lifestyle choices. But "Too Loud a Solitude" seems to thrive on these oppositions without ever seeming too much like a writerly conceit. We hear a lot about Hegel, about an ongoing, eternal war between rats in the city sewers, about the joy and pain that comes with compressing wastepaper, about a touching, almost wordless romance, and about the disasters that the twentieth century visited upon the city where it's set. Our narrator's got his hands in the dirt and his head in the clouds, and it makes him rather likable.

This book's narrator is, in a certain sense, a hermit: I kept wondering which gnome-like creature in Czech mythology he most resembled. But, like many readers, he's doesn't feel lonely, even when he's alone. We also hear about the curious social network that our main character's job has allowed him to build up. He's visited both by the near-destitute -- who provide him with wastepaper -- and a collection of priests, professors, and other crazed readers, all of whom are constantly on the lookout for material that interests them, some of which the Czech government would destroy on purely ideological grounds. Most of the characters we meet in "Too Loud a Solitude" are, to put it bluntly, a few volumes short of a full encyclopedia, but I think the author is trying to suggest that to really love books, you sort of have to be. Also, even though this book is set before the Iron Curtain fell, we don't hear much about the dreary sort of socialism that defined much of life in Eastern Europe for most of the last half of the twentieth century. Our main character's paper-stuffed cellar and his house -- which is full to bursting with the volumes that he's rescued from the press -- provide him genuine shelter from a fairly colorless reality. Hrabal wrote this one under an authoritarian socialist regime, but he might as well have been writing about some of the less-than-admirable aspects late capitalism, too. His metaphors are nothing if not flexible. This is a book about literature, about books, and about how loving both of these things can help us endure. Recommended, especially to especially to those who've spent their lives haunting libraries, bookstores -- or, why not? -- paper-recycling facilities. ( )

Dit is duidelijk een veel rijpere Hrabal die hier aan het woord is dan in zijn vroege ‘Zwaarbewaakte Treinen’: alles is nog meer doorwrocht, nog condenser, bol van de literaire verwijzingen. Maar het is vooral nog veel meer mistroostig. Want waar in de eerste roman de jonge protagonist aan het slot nog enig soelaas kon vinden in een (twijfelachtige) heldendaad, eindigt dit verhaal met een zeer gedetailleerd beschreven, en tegelijk tragische foert van de oudere protagonist Haňtá aan de ontmenselijkte samenleving. De ontwapenende ironie van dit boek is dat het net een ‘professioneel boekpletter’ is (“vijfendertig jaar plet ik oud papier en boeken”) die ons met de neus op die ontmenselijking drukt: Haňtá vermaalt/plet de boeken dan wel tot oude balen, maar hij koestert die boeken ook, haalt er de beste en mooiste uit, citeert bijvoorbeeld Kant, Rimbaud en Hegel en siert de balen oud papier die uit zijn machine spuien met prachtige omslagen van kunstboeken. Handarbeider Haňtá is tegelijk kunstenaar-intellectueel en door zijn tochten door het riool van Praag ook kenner van de zelfkant van de moderne samenleving. Zijn beschrijvingen doen onwillekeurig aan de Kafka van de Metamorfosen denken, al is dat wellicht een te voor de hand liggende vergelijking, misschien is het donkerste werk van Piranesi een betere referentie. Het knappe is ook dat Hrabal in weer amper 90 pagina’s een hele (mistroostige) wereld oproept en daar ook een treffend, dramatische pointe aan breit, een afrekening met de blind-mechaniserende, onttoverde wereld. ( )