Publisher's Synopsis
In Bohumil Hrabal's novella, Too Loud a Solitude, the narrator, Hanta, lives in
Czechoslovakia laboring under the dictates of Soviet-imposed communism. Hanta works in a
basement where he compacts paper and books for recycling. His profession forces him to
annihilate printed ideas and philosophies, much the way that - as Hrabal would have his reader
understand - history annihilates peoples and principalities. In the sewer system below his little
basement, Hanta visits with two former professors who, perhaps as punishment, are forced to
clean filth and refuse from the sewers of Prague. Despite their predicament, these two
academics set about their menial tasks while speculating over the motivations of two warring
clans of rats, theorizing about the nature of political animals in the face of war and destruction.
The irony is lost on the two effete intellectuals: a lifetime committed to inert ideas - a parody
on what was meant to save humanity.
