5/20/2023 0 Comments Gottland mariusz szczygiel![]() ![]() ![]() As a character in Mariusz Szczygieł’s Gottland points out, “in our country, anything that isn’t written down doesn’t really exist.” The books have to be written before they can point anywhere, or catch anyone with her pants down. “If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself.” Yet he saves the books. A hammock of books sags above his bed as he sleeps, and the only clear path is from the window to the bed to the bathroom, where the books often fall, “catching him with his pants down.” “Inquisitors burn books in vain,” he says. But he mourns the Great Books hidden inside each compacted bale, and his apartment is filled with the ones he can’t bear to compact. In Bohumil Hrabal’s mesmerizing novel Too Loud a Solitude, the narrator, Hanta, has been compacting paper in Czechoslovakia for 35 years: through WWII, the Communist regime, book bans, movie bans, and unspoken blacklists. ![]()
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