Another Look book club: Bohumil Hrabal's "Too Loud a Solitude"

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Another Look book club will discuss Czech author Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude, a dystopian novella on the indestructibility of the written word.

Hrabal's classic was published in a samizdat edition in Prague in 1976, and later published more widely after Communist rule ended in 1989. Its aging narrator runs a hydraulic press that crushes books and paper into bales. He rescues the best volumes for himself, and over time his thoughts and feelings merge with the treasures from the past – Hegel and the Talmud, Lao-Tze and Kant. According to the New York Times, “Mr. Hrabal's is a cry of expiring humanism, and Too Loud a Solitude is a book to salvage from the deadly indifference that is more effective in killing the letter than the most sophisticated compacting machine.” You can read the New York Times review here.

Acclaimed author Robert Pogue Harrison will moderate the discussion. The Stanford professor who is Another Look's director writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and hosts the popular talk show, Entitled Opinions. He will be joined by Stanford Prof. Hans Ulrich “Sepp” Gumbrecht, a European public intellectual and a prolific author, and German Prof. Karen Feldman of the University of California, Berkeley, whose research explores the nexus between literature and philosophy.

Another Look is a seasonal book club that draws together Stanford's top writers and scholars with distinguished figures from the Bay Area and beyond. The books are Stanford’s picks for short masterpieces you may not have read before. 

Too Loud a Solitude is available at Stanford Bookstore, and also will stocked at Kepler's in Menlo Park and Bell's Books in Palo Alto by the beginning of the new year.