Sometime ago when I heard about Ann Morgan’s journey through the
world through books, I was fascinated by the idea. Apart from the cost of the
books, I can’t see another affordable and authentic way of seeing the world. Of
course, it can be argued that one book or one author can’t possibly tell you
all there is to tell about one country. But think of it like this: when you
meet someone from a distant land on a train or bus, you’re grateful for that
opportunity – at least I am – to have been able to peep into another world and
other lives. You don’t think of complaining, “Hey, not fair that I only got to
meet one person from xyz country?”
I have decided to follow in Morgan’s steps and for those
countries that I have no idea where to look for books or authors, I will follow
her even in the books she has read. I think there will be a lot of such
countries.
So, Too Loud a
Solitude is my first step in this world tour. It’s written by Bohumil
Hrabal in Czech and translated by Michael Henry Heim. Coincidentally, there’s a
thread of commonality between my choice of the book and my renewed interest in
waste management: the protagonist Hanta’s job is to compact waste paper. (There are accent marks missing from his name that I know not how to reproduce.)
Of course, the last thing that Hanta wants to do is to send
fine books to their death. He’s been saving books from the paper compacter
throughout his career of 35 years and has ended up with a stash of nearly two
tons of books at his place.
Quaint things happen in Hanta’s life. Like for instance, the
misfortune of his girlfriend who always seems to get faeces on her dress at the
most public of moments. Or, how the kind, absent-minded philosophy professor
routinely mistakes Hanta for his employer, an older man, when he has his hat
on.
I keep looking for clues to the politics and culture of a
place when I’m reading fiction. In Hrabal’s book, it comes in the form of the
new-age paper compacting machine and its eager attendants – the Brigade of
Socialist Labor – that Hanta feels threatened by, what with its inhumane vigour
and its un-reading, uncaring staff.
Hanta is scandalized to see them drinking milk at work: “But
the biggest shock came when I saw the young workers shamelessly guzzling milk
and soft drinks – legs spread wide, hand on hip – straight from the bottle…
think of drinking milk at work when
everyone knows that even a cow would rather die of thirst than touch a drop of
the stuff!” But his heart breaks when he sees them put in bales and bales of
books without stopping for a moment to think about the thoughts and words they crush
with their machine.
Soon, he finds himself replaced with these men from the
Socialist Labour group. He has nowhere to go and roams around the city,
guzzling down beer after beer. Finally, he decides to compact himself in his
machine with his beloved wastepaper.
I loved what he has done here by showing capitalism under
the guise of socialism. The doing away of any appreciation of art is, of
course, given here, but it also shows a disconnect between even man and the
machine.
To Hanta, there’s no way you can travel to Greece without
having read about Aristotle or Plato or even Goethe. So relevant in our times
of consumerist culture where we flit about from land to land, ticking off
places from our bucket list.
There never was a greater lover of books than Hanta, for he
chose to be a wastepaper handler just so he could lay his hands on books.
“…just as a beautiful fish will occasionally sparkle in the waters of a
polluted river that runs through a stretch of factories, so in the flow of old
paper the spine of a rare book will occasionally shine forth…”
As I read the book, I become very conscious of the fact that
I too am holding a book in my hand and hope that I will never be callous enough
to toss it in amidst waste paper. Hrabal renews my gratitude to authors who
enable time travel, who pack their thoughts into words and share them with us,
who lay bare before us beauty as well as misery. For, “real thoughts come from outside
and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words,
inquisitors burn books in vain. If a book has anything to say, it burns with a
quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself.”
