Too Loud a Solitude is a novella by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal about Haňťa, a compactor of waste paper. Haňťa has for 35 years been making bales of paper, crushing everything from bloody, sickly sweet butcher paper to rare and valuable books. The books he reads reverentially; he takes them home and adds them to the two ton stack perilously held over his head as he sleeps; and he uses them to stud his bales of compacted paper, turning the bales into his own works of art.
This section comes as Haňťa visits an old sweetheart:
… Manča showed me around the cottage, from basement to attic, explaining in hushed tones how an angel had come to her and she had obeyed him and taken up with a ditchdigger and spent all her savings on a plot of land in the woods, and the ditchdigger dug the foundation and slept in a tent with her, but then she threw him over for a bricklayer, and the bricklayer made love to her in the tent and put up all the walls, and then Manča took up with a carpenter and he did all the carpentry work and shared her bed, but then she threw threw him over for a plumber, who slept in the same bed as the carpenter but did all the plumbing, only to be replaced by a roofer, who made love to her and laid her roof with concrete tile but was eventually replaced by a mason, who roughcast all her walls and ceilings by day and slept in her bed by night, until she took up with a cabinetmaker, who made all new furniture in return for her bed, and so it was that Manča, with nothing but a bed and a clear cut goal, built herself a house.