A review by doctorwithoutboundaries
Too Loud A Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal

3.0

Ha’nta’s world of books is under threat, besieged by the twin aggressors of censorship and technology, much like Guy Montag’s in [b: Fahrenheit 451|13079982|Fahrenheit 451|Ray Bradbury|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1383718290l/13079982._SY75_.jpg|1272463]. His surreptitious and solitudinous rebellion against a totalitarian regime that despises intellect is waged from within a claustrophobic cellar where he compacts books into bales of garbage—but not before reading and stealing a few for his own private library, where he is soon to be caved in by piles of books: books that make him wax eloquent and books that shake his foundations, full of new ideas and new ways of living and thinking. And we are privy to these innermost thoughts about his first and only love, his respite and recompense for the horrid work expected of him; they pour out in a convoluted stream of consciousness, full of run-on sentences that rendered it beautiful at times, moving, even, and yet it lost my ardour at several points. What should have been a home run, fell flat, as all the ingredients were present, the poignant themes to which I repeatedly return, but haphazardly mixed to make a dulling concoction. I wanted to love it, because I felt I should, a pressure akin to that of the ominous machine from the book, one that I’m trying to resist more and more. Maybe it was the timing, maybe it’s me; either way, I was glad to make Ha’nta’s acquaintance in Czechoslovakia of old, a soul after my own, a reader who collects ideas like treasured seeds, letting them grow inside him, who loves art in every form, who battles fascism silently in his own way, a revolution loud enough to change only one—even if the cost is to be crushed by the many books that he saves from destruction, the source of his “unwitting education”, full of novel propositions, each of them valued deeply by one man, enough to spare them from extinction.