Bohumil Hrabal?
The writer responsible for this week's bon mot is a Czech satirist (aren't all Czechs satirists??), perhaps best known for 'Closely Observed Trains' (which was adapted into a very highly acclaimed film 40-odd years ago). Last summer, while visiting friends in the States, I read a short novel of his called 'Too Loud A Solitude', from which the quotation is taken.
Great title! Intriguing concept, too: it's a Kafka-ish fable about a man who has spent his entire working life in a damp windowless basement compacting waste paper and books in a hydraulic press. There are rather too many books, of course, what with government censors withdrawing titles from circulation on a whim and anti-bourgeois sentiments condemning countless private libraries to destruction. The discarded books become his life. He hands on selected titles to various collectors - underground academics - that he's met. He smuggles thousands of them home for himself (the huge weight of them on a precarious platform above his bed nightly threatens him with obliteration - a sword of Damocles). He makes his bricks of compressed paper into art works, with specially chosen books hidden like pearls in the middle of them, and reproductions of Old Master paintings wrapped around the outside. He even saves up his money to buy the press for himself, so that he can continue this work after his retirement.
You might say the man has an unhealthy obsession with crushing and being crushed, and it's not too difficult to guess how it ends. It's a slight thing, very short, and with no real 'story' to speak of, but it does linger powerfully in the memory.
You might say the man has an unhealthy obsession with crushing and being crushed, and it's not too difficult to guess how it ends. It's a slight thing, very short, and with no real 'story' to speak of, but it does linger powerfully in the memory.
And - as with John Banville, the Irish writer I've quoted on here a few times - the richness of the language is a constant delight.
I particularly liked this summation of the joy of reading: "I do not so much read as savour the words. I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck on it like a fruit drop."
I particularly liked this summation of the joy of reading: "I do not so much read as savour the words. I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck on it like a fruit drop."
2 comments:
I enjoyed that summation of the joy of reading, also.
Though, most slow readers who I know, do not read. They claim they are too slow at reading and hence, haven't got the time/patience/interest to read a book.
So, it would interest me to hear opinions from slow readers who do like to read (Froog?) on how they overcame the potential boredom/impatience of slow reading to develop a joy for reading.
P.S. I'd be interested to hear how you came across Hrabal... Perhaps your American hosts had him on their bookshelf? Or were you spending a lazy summer afternoon at the local Steve Sundries*, or perhaps you found it forgotten in the airplane seat pocket?
*Steve Sundries was my and my dad's favorite second hand book shop when I was a child.
It's not boredom that's the problem. If you're getting bored with a book, it's the book, not you - give it up and read something else. Speed of reading has no bearing on that.
The problem is rather a lack of stamina - you end up feeling physically and mentally exhausted, and begin to despair of ever being able to finish (or of being able to finish within any kind of reasonable timeframe). And it can be difficult to remember relevant elements of a story if the reading is spread over a long period, to 'keep your place'; it can certainly be difficult to develop an overall appreciation of a book if the reading of it takes several months rather than just a few days. This is my difficulty: not only does my slow reading mean that tackling a whole novel requires several sessions of reading, but in order to make significant progress those sessions have to be quite extended, and so I am often easily discouraged from attempting one. Unless I have at least an hour or two to spare, and am feeling quite mentally sharp, there doesn't seem to be any point in picking up a novel.
Thus, I find that these days I really only read novels when I am on holiday and can devote time to them every day. Here in Beijing, I am too busy for that - so mostly I read only poetry, short stories, humorous anthologies, magazines.
The Hrabal was on the British Cowboy's shelf. I don't know how it came to be there.
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