Description

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.