An interesting short read (less than 100 pages) is Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude, a story of Hanta’s 35 years as a compactor of wastepaper and books in a Czech police state. One review sums it up well: "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 books from jaws of hydraulic presses and now his house is filled to the rooftops. Destroyer of the written word, he is also its perpetuator. When a new automatic press makes his job redundant there’s only one thing he can do – go down with his ship."
The book’s viewpoint is very Eastern European – comedy with pathos, resignation, the profound and the mundane wrapped in a single cord. The Latin American writers are most associated with Magical Realism, but it has a flavor in the Czechs as well – Kundera and Hrabal and Kafka (not really Czech, but still).
The Latin version feels spiritual, a push of Catholicsm to its edges, like the Shroud of Turin or demonic possession and exorcism. These scenes always read colorful. Eastern European magical realism is a splash of paint against inevitable gray, a momentary kindness from the fates, a butterfly appearing out from under a trash compactor, but just for a moment before it is crushed. Spend your country’s history being tossed between the Russians and Germans and your reflections will also be on the tragedy of the human condition.
Hanta’s artistic creations are made of trash (are all of ours, perhaps?). He wraps bales of wastepaper in prints of great works of art, prints that like the books Hanta rescues have been censored by the government. Hanta knows that his pieces will have but a few moment’s exhibition as they are driven across town. Expression is futile, a hopeless protest against the force of the state, but what else do we have?
After drinking too much beer, he has visions of Jesus and Lao-tze side-by-side. He refers to Jesus as an ardent young man intent on changing the world, and Lao-tze as submissive. He writes: "I watched Jesus cast a spell of prayer on reality and lead it in the direction of miracle, while Lao-tze followed the laws of nature along the Tao, the only Way to learned ignorance."
Drinking from his mug, he keeps his eyes glued on his visions: to "young Jesus, all ardor amidst a group of youths and pretty girls, and the lonely Lao-tze, looking only for a worthy grave." He watches the "young Jesus still suffused with mellow ecstasy and Lao-tze leaning sad and pensive against the edge of the drum and looking on with scornful indifference"
"Jesus giving confident orders and making a mountain move, and Lao-tze spreading a net of ineffable intellect over the cellar; Jesus the optimistic spiral and Lao-tze the closed circle, Jesus bristling
with dramatic situations and Lao-tze lost in thought over the insolubility of moral conflicts."
He has visions of countless other characters and authors from books we all know and love. Sometimes his accounts are disturbing, other times priceless but almost always amusing.
Reading this book makes one feel all warm and snuggly remembering the masters Kafka and Camus, Gogol’s absurdity and Thomas Bernhard’s almost nihilistic stream of consciousness. It’s like walking through a museum and seeing a small but penetrating sketch that ties into a school of painting in ways that also show the individuality of that particular artist.
It is worth mentioning, too, that even the humiliations of Hanta’s relationship with his employers and the oppression of the state are not what do him in. It’s technology, that totalitarian God, the Zeus of our pantheon, more powerful than any ideology or "ism."
Ray Lewis heads up the tax consulting business, Tax Therapy, based in Boulder and San Francisco. Ray writes about everything from finance, taxes, business and technology to sports, travel, politics and music.
He was formerly a technology consultant at The New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and served as a faculty member of The Sawtooth Writers Conference in Stanley, Idaho, an annual event dedicated to teaching fiction and poetry to gifted teenagers.
