Nathanson, Donald L. Review of Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabal. American Journal of Psychiatry 153, no. 12 (December 1996): 1640.

[In the following review, Nathanson provides a positive assessment of Too Loud a Solitude, commenting on its poignancy and psychological insight.]

It feels good to read a novel [Too Loud a Solitude] about a man who loves his work, especially when the writing is transcendently beautiful, the observations are trenchant, and the apparent theme is all of the books from which Western culture has been constructed. Yet the opening sentences, repeated with slight variation as the introduction to five of its eight brief, almost poetic chapters, point the reader in another direction: “For thirty-five years now I've been in waste paper, and it's my love story. For thirty-five years I've been compacting wastepaper and books, smearing myself with letters until I've come to look like my encyclopedias—and a good three tons of them I've compacted over the years. I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me.” This is the love poem of a man who stands ambivalently between his hunger for knowledge and his disgust for the processes through which it is disavowed by a society that treats books as mere things that must be discarded when they have ceased to entertain us by their novelty.

This nameless protagonist works alongside filth and vermin, living on beer to shield himself from full awareness, oscillating between the pride achieved when he signs a bale of compressed knowledge as if he were an artist of concision and the horror triggered when he finds a book of rare beauty and significance among those tossed into his pit by the trash collectors for whom he is a toilet rather than a person. Tons of books have entered the discreet maw of his hydraulic press. Each book destroyed is a death he mourns, each book he recognizes as too important to crush is brought to his own apartment and stored above and alongside his bed until he has come to live within a 3-ton mass of books with the potential energy to crush him as finally as any metal press.

He has a life, this compactor of books and knowledge, and it dribbles from the pages of his musings as liquid might be squeezed from any living thing under terminal pressure. Relationships have been contained and baled in memories squeezed free of emotion. People met as he walks the streets of Prague are labeled only from his books—Jesus and Lao Tse, characters from novels, figures from history—rather than their own lives. People are possible companions only when their disavowal of shame and disgust parallels his own.

Just as fashion and men's eyes transform a book from a thing of beauty to junk, the speaker's effective life ends when he is shown the newest breed of electronically controlled compactor, capable of handling quantities of paper that dwarf his own press to insignificance and run by crisply uniformed, clean-shaven young men who clear a space for their lunch of crisp sandwiches and milk. The pristine, macabre beauty of this new device throws into sudden awareness the sewer-like nature of his personal world; when disavowal crumbles, only death within the bowels of his own press can complete his life.

As psychiatrists, it is our job to learn everything we can about every emotion. I knew a man who lived for 3 years of the Holocaust in the sewers of Prague, who emerged when finally told he was safe and went directly to a bakery, where he devoured everything fresh in sight until only shame at his gluttony made him buy and carry home an armload of bread for which he now had no need. His wife told me there must always be a dish of fresh, shiny fruit by his elbow, that he needed its beauty and fragrance as constant contrast to the dark smells of his confinement. Too Loud a Solitude reveals the world of innate affects that Tomkins calls “disgust” and “dissmell,” psychological mechanisms that have evolved from their origin as protection from bad food to their status in the adult as monitors of interpersonal distance. Hrabal offers us a rare opportunity to learn what we normally avoid, in prose of even more rare distinction.