About
Author: Daniela Kapitanova (Slovakia)
Genre: Socio-Political
Setting
Place: Komarno, Slovakia
Time: 1980-1990s
My Rating (see what this means)
My Subjective Rating: 3
My ‘Objective’ Rating: 1.77
Short Blog Notice:
I avoid writing full length blogs for all books. I still create a page for my completionist proclivities.
These can be books when I feel I don't have something new I can add over existing online content
OR when I don't like the book.
Introduction
A drunk rambling fortune teller foreseeing one would write a cemetery book, should invite a healthy dollop of scepticism from the one whose fortune is being told. Not for Daniela Kapitáňová‘s protagonist Samko Tále of ‘Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book‘ fame.
It doesn’t take us long to figure out there is something wrong with Samko. Suffering from a physical and a mental disability – which definitely has a name, Samko – the village idiot of Komarno should be a character for sympathy. However, that sympathy quickly dissolves as his casual simple-minded racism, chauvinism, antisemitism etc. come to fore.
Navigating the times just before and after the fall of communism in Slovakia, and still beholden to the communist order – Samko rambles anecdote after anecdote from his life – suddenly finding time to write the cemetery book he was destined to write when his handcart breaks down. Often funny, always tragic – this buffoon-esque character, an unwitting proud informer for a communist ‘higher-up’, he paints an engaging picture of an hesitant Slovakia coming out of the communist shell.