Too Loud A Solitude
I have trouble writing this blog post because I take it all so seriously. I still write by hand in art paper notebooks, and am thinking of getting out my old typewriter because I miss typed manuscripts. Then again . . . I am also thinking of writing a whole book on birchbark with my teeth. I do have news of a terrific read. If you like Borges, Saramago, Kafka, Angela Carter, or writers born in Brno in 1914, who died in Prague in 1987, if you liked Bohumil Hrabal's Closely Watched Trains, or if you have never heard of Hrabal and you love books -- this is your book.
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. I read it a month ago. Then I read it again last night. Maybe I'll read it again today. The book is about a man whose job is crushing books. It is a book about loving books and destroying books, about love and destruction, the crushing of ideas, the drinking of beer. It is not a long book, but you will read it again and again. It is a perfect book, I think.
Besides reading this one book again and again, I've been reading newspapers. I have been reading lots of newspapers with the awful feeling that the wonderful feel of print under my fingers, the dry snap as you unfold a newspaper, the paging back and forth, the tactile reality of the newspaper, is going to vanish. So I've suddenly subscribed to several newspapers that I casually picked up every other day at the grocery store. And all I give people for birthdays now is newspaper subscriptions. I am doing this not only for the integrity of the news and the selfish feeling of joy I get when unfolding a newspaper, but for the many people I know who rely on completing the puzzles on newspaper pages -- for the lovely Finnish-American-Upper Peninsula Geology Professor I met on the airplane. He was in his late eighties and had a folded crossword puzzle in his hand. He was stuck but did not want me to brainstorm on an answer. He enjoyed looking at his puzzle last thing before he went to sleep, and waking with the answer. His was too loud a solitude, and puzzles are a friendly noise.
