PRILIS HLUCNA SAMOTA
(TOO LOUD A SOLITUDE)
Samizdat edition
Prague, Czechoslovakia
This fall, American readers will be treated to Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude. It is the story of a man who is sent with others so-called unreliables by the proletarian state of Czechoslovakia to destroy confiscated books and paintings. Before the books are destroyed, however, their souls penetrate the souls of the "unreliables," who are touched by the most noble of ideas. The paper shredders become the companions of Socrates and Plato, Sophocles, Aristotle, Confucius, Moses, Jesus, Freud, Franz Kafka -the endless richness of human life.
Too Loud a Solitude is in the form of a passionate confession, a monologue by the main character, Hrabal's alter ego. Other voices appear as quotations. The structure is repetitious, almost like a musical composition, but it is literature. It is his best book. Even Hrabal agrees. It contains the essence of his life and the essence of civilization as he has perceived it.
In one passage Hrabal tells of books from monasteries where books were collected for centuries. These books will be destroyed in a day. And they are beautiful books that were hand painted. The protagonist feels the pain of these books, and he knows there is no substitute for them. And without his saying it, the books that are destroyed remind us of the people that were destroyed by communism. This is what is written but unwritten.
It is an unforgettable book. Each of Hrabal's books has some mystery, but through this one, Hrabal has entered the league of the world's best writers. Too Loud a Solitude was never published in Czechoslovakia except in samizdat, but it will be published there soon under the auspices of the newly formed Society for Bohumil Hrabal (for Czechs, Hrabal is almost a national hero) as well as in America by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Outliving the Censors
Hrabal started his literary career as a poet relatively late in life. Born in 1914, he collected his first poems in a tiny volume called Little Lost Street in 1948. But the book never reached the public, and all that remains are the galley proofs. His next collection of poems, Flowerbud, also went to a pulpmill.
A chilly Czechoslovakian political and cultural mood in the late 1950s meant that his next book, Lark on a String, was banned. Later, Hrabal changed the title to Pearls on the Bottom. It was confiscated a week before publication but was finally released in 1963. It is a collection of stories about the Kladno steelworks and the outskirts of Prague, about common people (the pearls on the bottom). Typical of people of common origin who have a never-common individuality, each of Hrabal's heroes has a unique approach to the world.
American readers will be amazed at how "American" Hrabal's literary education was. He graduated from Charles University in Prague with a law degree but was prohibited from practicing law because the communists declared him of bourgeois origin. It was absurd - his father
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