This is a very quick read at just 98 pages and it’s a bit of a strange one, it’s the last book which Hrabal published before his death, and the third book which I’ve read by the author.

Almost every chapter begins with the words For thirty-five years now I’ve been compacting wastepaper. Hanta loves his job and he loves his compacting machine. It isn’t only wastepaper which goes into his compacter, sometimes whole libraries of beautifully bound books are delivered to him and they are compacted too. He selects books from the never ending piles and reads from them, sometimes smuggling them to his home which is now stuffed full of wonderful and rare books. He even has books piled around and above his bed and there is very little living space left in his home.

Hanta knows that when he retires he won’t be able to stand being parted from his paper compacter and he is saving his money so that he can buy his beloved machine and keep using it when he is retired.

He’s always getting into trouble at work as he’s too slow and he drinks too much beer, but when he hears about a new paper press in a nearby town he decides to go and see it for himself. It is enormous and does the work of twenty presses, and Hanta knows that his days are numbered. What upset him more than anything was that the workers feeding the books into the huge machine wore gloves and didn’t even look at the books as they fed them into it. It was all too inhuman to him. Worst of all – the young workers were all drinking milk instead of beer.

As I said, it’s a wee bit weird. I felt that it had a lot to do with World War II. There’s mention of a massive war which is going on underground in the sewers between black and white rats. It’s always difficult when you’re reading a translation of something, you can never really be sure that you’re getting everything that the author wanted you to get out of it. Anyway, a worthwhile if ‘different’ read.