Mark Allen Cunningham's Holiday Gift Suggestion

For the next four weeks, right up to Christmas Eve, Beatrice has invited at least one author to recommend a book that would make a great holiday gift. We begin this feature with a weekend tribute to independent publisher Unbridled Books, which opened for business this fall with three titles (thus fitting into the long weekend perfectly).

Mark Allen Cunningham is the author of The Green Age of Asher Witherow, a fictional memoir of life in a 19th-century California mining town that Robert Olen Butler cites for its "strikingly beautiful prose style" and "unerring instinct for storytelling." It's Cunningham's first novel, but he's already attracted notices for his short stories, two of which have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Mark lives in Diablo Valley, California, with his wife, Katie.

"I compress wastepaper, and when I press the green button the wall of my press advances, and when I press the red button it retreats, thereby describing a basic motion of the world . . ." So muses Hanta--the drunken and delightfully discursive hero of Bohumil Hrabal’s tiny cosmos of a novel Too Loud a Solitude. Over the course of Hanta's thirty-five year career, he's conscribed countless copies of the world’s greatest literature and philosophy to the maw of his mechanical press in a dank cellar beneath the streets of communist-era Prague. But the mountain of waste never seems to diminish, since this pitiful subterranean drone cannot keep from rescuing and reading the treasures that flow past him. Hanta may be a "beer-soaked idiot" as his employer likes to say, but if so, he's an idiot after the fashion of that most irresistible of God's buffoons, Saint Francis. In fact, in Hanta, Hrabal has forged a fresh image of 20th-century sainthood, an iconic figure caught in a cycle of martyrdom--the destruction of all that makes his life precious: the written word at its most divine. Told with huge-hearted pathos, scatological humor, and linguistic filigree evocative of the baroque labyrinth of Prague, Too Loud a Solitude is a magnificent little book, so short that it can be read in an hour, but so vast that it inspires months of thought.

photo: Jack Francis