Nathanson, Donald L. Review of Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabal. American Journal of Psychiatry 153, no. 12 (December 1996): 1640.

In the following review, Nathanson provides a positive assessment of Too Loud a Solitude, commenting on its poignancy and psychological insight.

It feels good to read a novel [Too Loud a Solitude] about a man who loves his work, especially when the writing is transcendently beautiful, the observations are trenchant, and the apparent theme is all of the books from which Western culture has been constructed. Yet the opening sentences, repeated with slight variation as the introduction to five of its eight brief, almost poetic chapters, point the reader in another direction: “For thirty-five years now I've been in waste paper, and it's my love story. For thirty-five years I've been compacting wastepaper and books, smearing myself with letters until I've come to look like my encyclopedias—and a good...