It tells the story of an old man who works as a paper crusher in Prague, using his job to save and amass astounding numbers of rare and banned books; he is an obsessive collector of knowledge during an era of censorship.

Despite earning a law degree from Charles University in 1946, Hrabal never practiced as a lawyer and instead worked various jobs until beginning to write full time in 1962.

[1] He compacted wastepaper in a recycling facility from October 1954 until February 1959, and during this time wrote his first fictional account of his experiences featuring Haňťa as the protagonist.

[2] After working many odd jobs, Hrabal eventually began writing full time, but he was banned from publication after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968[1] and the normalization of the communist regime.

Sergio Corduas first translated the text into Italian for the publishing house Einaudi in 1987 as Una solitudine troppo rumorosa and revised the work in 2003.

[7] The novel is narrated in the first person by Haňťa, a reclusive man nearing retirement who has spent his life compacting wastepaper for recycling in a cellar in Prague.

His uncle dies, and he is called to take care of the body, which sparks Haňťa to remember the long-lost love of his youth, who he refers to only as a Gypsy girl.

Too Loud a Solitude is written in this characteristic style, which Hrabal called pábení and which most closely translates to "palavering.

"[8] The narrative meanders through Haňťa's daily life as he travels between work and home, through his interactions with others, through his memories, and through the wisdom he learns from his beloved books.

This wandering narrative style advances the plot slowly and takes the time to explore symbolism and themes within the novel.

In many ways, Hrabal followed the genre conventions created by his friend and fellow Czech author Egon Bondy of total realism.

The New York Times review of the 1990 English translation described the book as, "a parable of the effort to maintain a semblance of sanity despite the presence or the memories of Nazi jackboots and Russian tanks in Prague.

Too Loud a Solitude explores different themes with symbolism about and allegorical commentary on life in Czechoslovakia under censorship.

In addition, there is recurring reference throughout Too Loud a Solitude to a rat war taking place beneath the city.

This phenomenon is observed by Haňťa's friends who, like him, are scholars working underneath the city in central-heating control rooms and sewers.

This advancement in technology can be seen as representing a tension between the old ways and the new, between Haňťa's devotion to reading and the destruction of books by the Socialist Laborers without discrimination.

The main theme of Too Loud a Solitude is of the permanence and intangibility of ideas which may, for a time, come to manifest in the form of books and words.

Similarly, Haňťa recalls how after his mother was cremated and her ashes spread,"For a long time thereafter I would hear the crunch of human skeletons whenever my hydraulic press entered its final phase and crushed the beautiful books with a force of twenty atmospheres, I would hear the crunch of human skeletons and feel I was grinding up the skulls of press-crushes classics, the part of the Talmud that says, 'For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us'" (14).

Haňťa thinks,"How much more beautiful it must have been in the days when the only place a thought could make its mark was the human brain and anybody wanting to squelch ideas had to compact human heads, but even that wouldn't have helped, because real thoughts come from outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, inquisitors burn books in vain" (2).The notion that ideas are indestructible even when books are destroyed can be understood as resisting censorship, as even when books are banned or destroyed, their ideas are spread.

[12] In 2007, director Genevieve Anderson released a 17-minute stop motion and puppetry short film based on the novel starring Paul Giamatti as Haňťa.