Too loud a solitude
TOO LOUD A SOLITUDE is a tender and funny story of Hant'a - a man who has lived in a Czech police state - for 35 years, working as compactor of wastepaper and books. In the process of compacting, he has acquired an education so unwitting he can't quite tell which of his thoughts are his own and which come from his books. He has rescued many from jaws of hydraulic press and now his house is filled to the rooftops. Destroyer of the written word, he is also its perpetrator. But when a new automatic press makes his job redundant there's only one thing he can do - go down with his ship. This is an eccentric romp celebrating the indestructability- against censorship, political opression etc - of the written word.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
2mentions
2people
2014–2018years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Foreign:
* Life: a users manual by George s Perec.
* Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
* Auto-da-fe by Elias Canetti
Domestic:
These are harder because I feel like they’re all pretty well known, but maybe they’re not actually read. Like, known bc people have heard the name, but are not read as much anymore.
* Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
* Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
* Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Actually unknown (but super good) domestic:
* Stuff by Larry McMurtry (only famous for lonesome dove)
- I sorta regret writing that in retrospect because its a somewhat reply-bait thing to write.
But I was thinking of Bohumil Hrabal as my most dear author.
In some respects they are very different, in that Hrabal doesn't quite have the same magical realism bent. But in their writing itself, in their structure, they are often similar: Hrabal also favors extremely long sentences. Hrabal's book Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is actually just one long run-on sentence that spans 160 pages. Even when Hrabal's sentences are not long, his paragraph breaks are few. It drives some people mad, but I think if you can follow along, it is an immense pleasure to read.
Both of them adore language:
> "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 sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing through the veins to the root of each blood vessel."
An example of those beautiful sentences: https://gist.github.com/simonsarris/11014861 (made a gist so I stop polluting comment-space so much)
That's from Too Loud a Solitude by Hrabal, a short book, probably the most beautiful pamphlet I have ever read.
