Though the Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal holds a degree in law, for many years, for political reasons, he was forced to make his living baling wastepaper. Out of this experience he has fashioned a compact novel about the fine art of compaction, a novel about Haňt’a, who for thirty-five years has worked a one-man hydraulic press, baling books and paper in a dank, dim-lit cellar in Prague. Haňt’a smuggles home what books he can from those the State employs him to destroy; there he pieces together the classical education that, once upon a time, was the pride of the State but now is forbidden the citizenry. His is a fitting profession for an amateur scholar living in “a onetime kingdom where it was and still is a custom, an obsession, to compact thoughts and images patiently in the heads of the population, thereby bringing them ineffable joy and even greater woe; living among people who will lay down their lives for a bale of compacted thoughts.”
Haňt’a’s thoughts, marinated in the beer he swills to make his workday tolerable, are a pulpy mess of the Greeks and the Prophets, of Kant and Hegel, of Jesus and Lao-tze. Those that recur most often are thoughts on guilt, for though he is the living vessel of his beloved authors’ ideas, he is also, quite literally, those ideas’ bloody-pawed destroyer. Haňt’a is always behind in his work; he takes pains to make each bale a splendid thing; he lines the drum of his press with Old Master prints and in its center, among “withered flowers, tinsel, and angel’s hair,” places a single great book, opened to a passage of especial beauty. Haňt’a’s bales are no mere bales, they are reliquaries—and atonements for his shameful complicity in what he once called, to the laughter of the authorities, a crime against humanity.
Haňt’a’s bales are no mere bales, they are reliquaries—and atonements.
Haňt’a has a dream of redemption: five years hence he will purchase his press, retire with it to a garden, and there will make one perfect bale each day from the three thousand tons of books in his personal library, “a bale,” he says, “I’ll never need be ashamed of . . . I’ll pour all my youthful illusions into it, everything I know, everything I’ve learned during my thirty-five years of work . . . a bale to end all bales.” His dream is shattered by the opening of an enormous new press on the outskirts of town, a press capable of compacting whole runs of books into “a single titanic bale the size of a rich man’s mausoleum,” a press manned by a youthful, milk-guzzling unit of the Brigade of Socialist Labor. Just one look at that towering press, gleaming in its glass-walled, sun-lit suburban building, and Haňt’a knows that it’s over for him and his plans and his rites in his cellar: “This was a new era with new men and new methods.” To this coming generation of press operators, all smiles and spotless coveralls and unbloodied baby-blue work gloves, a bale could never be anything but a bale.
Too Loud a Solitude, composed in the mid-Seventies, loses none of its considerable poignancy in light of the recent changes in Czechoslavakia. Hrabal’s portrait of a member of the “underground elite,” of a man of intelligence and principle sullied by compromise with an inhumane world, will not date. It is, sadly, as timeless as Haňt’a’s favorite dictum of Lao-tze: “Know thy shame and preserve thy glory.”