the book of my life
NoonAugust 24, 2022 – 08:17
Bohumil Hrabal tells the story of an unwittingly cultured man
from Athos Zontini
For many years I lived in passing houses, between rented rooms and apartments of friends where I was supposed to stay just a couple of nights and I left months later. At twenty it is easy to confuse precariousness with freedom, but it is not only for this reason that I fondly remember those impromptu stays: in those term houses, where I thought there was nothing of mine, I discovered many of the books I am more tied. A too noisy solitude of Bohumil Hrabal, I happened to be in my hands in a small apartment in Rome that overlooked the Gazometro, and it was love at first sight; but how can you resist a book with such a title? You haven’t even opened it and you already have the impression that it speaks of you, of that distance from the world and from others that you have already known even if you would not have been able to describe it, at least with so few words. You begin to read it still standing, in front of the bookshop where you found it: «I’ve been working on old paper for thirty-five years and it’s my love story. For thirty-five years with old paper and books, for thirty-five years I have smeared myself with characters, so that I resemble the encyclopedias, of which in those years I must surely have pressed thirty quintals, they are a jug full of living and dead water… ».
The first few lines are enough and you realize that it is not true, fortunately that book does not talk about you at all, on the contrary, it is the furthest away from you if you did not live in Prague in the 1950s, you have never worked on a mechanical press for the pulping of paper and you do not spend your days getting drunk in the brewery or your nights in a public park wishing to end it all. You sit on the sofa and go on waiting for the plot to take shape, but there is only Hanta who drinks beer, steals books from old paper and chooses those with which to compose the bales to be macerated. The text is a continuous inner monologue, an alternation of childhood memories, tavern stories and reflections on being in the world where the action is stripped down, the dialogues almost non-existent, the rarefied punctuation, the paragraphs dilated to the point of almost losing the sense of speech, yet you do not get bored, on the contrary, you can not stop reading even if you do not find references, you are disoriented every time Hrabal uses a comma where a period was needed, when suddenly changes the tenses of the narration or stops suddenly while he’s telling you something and starts talking about something else. Immersed in the days of an alcoholic worker, in the chaotic flow of his thoughts, you have no idea where the story is headed, if there is a story; but even this no longer matters: you are getting used to those lopsided phrases, disorder finds its own geometry, discrepancy becomes an element of seduction.
It is a bit like when certain musicians consciously choose to play the wrong notes in a piece and don’t care about going against every harmonic rule because they like the sound of that mistake, it is part of their language, they feel it is necessary to bring out really what they have to say. As Sergio Corduas, translator and editor of the Einaudi edition, writes in the appendix: “In Solitude we can fully see how this writer has poetry and narration in his fingers and on his fingers, but he is not a poet and he is not a novelist: Hrabal escapes and perhaps flees this methodological distinction. In short, Solitude is either an antiquated or a future text, even better the two together. It’s kind of a huge and difficult surprise. ‘ Too noisy loneliness belongs to those books that you can only love or hate, there is no middle ground, also because usually the reasons why you fall in love with them are the same ones that someone else hates. It is a short text, a hundred pages, I read it in an afternoon but every now and then I take it up again, I scroll through a few chapters and I always end up finding something new in it.
One of the scenes I went back to most often is the one in which Hanta leaves the workplace because she can’t stand the insults and harassment of her boss anymore, she starts wandering around the city and gets lost among other warehouses, other undergrounds: ” Along the ladder I went down to the bottom of the trumpet, and after taking courage I took off the manhole cover, knelt down and listened to how the sewage poured and gurgled, I heard the beating of the toilets in the descent, I listened to the melodic flow of the sinks and the drainage of the soapy from the tubs, as if listening to a storm of sea waves and salty waters, yet when I sharpened my hearing the cry of the fighting mice, the gnawing of the flesh, the moan and the jubilation, the crackling and gurgling of the bodies in struggle, sounds that came from unspecified distances, but I knew that in any periphery, if I remove the manhole cover or the grate and descend, everywhere one is or waging that last rat fight, that seeming last war that will end with a great riot that will last until a reason is found for everything to start again ».
The walk in the Prague basement somehow clears Hanta’s mind, calms him: “… so that I work more easily than yesterday, I even work mechanically, and meanwhile I can go back into the womb of times, when I was young, when I stretched every Saturday my pants and I would polish my shoes with cream on the sole, because young people love cleanliness and their self-image… ». Still in the damp and dark warehouse where she is destroying texts by Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche, Kant and many others, Hanta sinks into her memories: “It’s evening, I’m at a dance party, the one I was waiting for is coming, it’s Mancinka and behind her they wave the ribbons and ribbons woven in their hair, the music plays and I dance only with Mancinka and we dance and the world revolves around me like a carousel… ».
The war of the rats in the sewers continually alternates with the light memories of that youthful love: the whole book has this trend, this continuous rebound between beauty and disgust, disenchantment and emotion. One page after another you come across the bloody cartons that butchers bring to the shredder, the blow flies that besiege them, two young gypsies who “raised their skirts up to their navel, fished cigarettes and matches somewhere and so stretched out they smoked on their backs, they took puffs as if they were nibbling chocolate from their cigarettes ». And every time you wonder how it is possible that those jarring images manage to coexist and take turns so naturally, but at the end of the book it is Hrabal himself who tells you that there is no difference between wonder and horror, between friendship and contempt for the world: “Leaning against the counter of the open window in the black beer bar, I drink Popovice’s ten degrees, I tell myself, from this moment, friend, you have to be alone in everything, you have to force yourself to go among the people, you have to have fun alone, you have to do theater alone, until you abandon yourself alone, because from now on only melancholy circles circulate, and so you go on and on at the same time you come back (…) I sat on the bench, I smiled candidly, not I remembered nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing, because by now I was perhaps already in the heart of the earthly Paradise ».
24th August 2022 | 08:17
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