Too Loud a Solitude
Edition: New Ed edition
Publisher: Abacus
Published: May 27, 1993
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 112
ISBN-13: 9780349102627
Subjects: Modern fiction; Fiction
First sentence: "For thirty-five years now I've been in wastepaper, and it's my love story."  (Michael Henry Heim's beautiful translation.)
Description: Funny, absurd, sad, ultimately tragic and at the same time affirmational, this story of Hanta is one of the great celebrations of the human spirit and of the transcendent value of art and beauty.  (It is also a sly and delightful satire on totalitarian attempts to control what we read, think, and feel.) Hrabal is one of the most delightful and unpredictable writers of all time, and for all that this book takes place in a filthy cellar with the background noises of rats fighting in the sewers, it is an exhilarating and uplifting hymn to the beauty and worth of the human spirit.