Too Loud A Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabal

🖤😢

It is hard to underscore the melancholic beauty of this book. An exploration of futility, of the ineradicable inhumanity of humankind.

Told by a wastepaper compactor, toiling away for decades, slinging discarded paper refuse, bloody butcher paper, and books into his compacting machine — but each bale a work of art, adorned with discarded reproductions of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, or blessed with the words of the old masters, books splayed on top, open to the key page.

While all around progress, inhuman progress, the steady march of socialist inanity, ignorant efficiency. “Why does Lao-tze say that to be born is to exit and to die is to enter?”