Samko Tále is a dwarf and has some sort of mild mental disability. He makes a living collecting scrap cardboard in his trolley and delivering it to the hated Krkan at the Recycling Station. But right now the trolley is in need of repairs, and Samko, who is a very hard worker, is forced to sit idle for days. This might be a good time to fulfill the prophecy given to him by the drunk Gusto Ruhe, who once accepted Samko’s drink as payment and scribbled on the ground: “Will write the book about the cemetery”. But why the cemetery? What can one write about it, besides the one page book Samko already wrote years ago? His story becomes instead a meandering, about the much better life under communist times (despite having to be in the same country as the despicable czechs), when RSDr Gunar Karol was always pleased with all the information Samko overheard for him, when he was allowed to give the pioneer vow - and when his sister Ivana wasn’t a world famous singer of whom one needed to be ashamed. He also tells of his uncle Oto and his pact with fungi, of the depressed artist Alf. Nevery… and despite trying not to, he keeps coming back to Darinka Gunarova, the object of his teenage desire, and Tonko, the great young athlete who loved her, but who couldn’t stop believing in God. And what happened to them. Perhaps this is a book about the cemetery after all.

This is my first ever experience with Slovakian literature and it’s really an original, interesting read. Samko’s peculiar language, meticulous but very limited and full of repetition, is the driving force of this slim novel, and Kapitanova does a great job of bringing it to life. It’s the same sort of quality you can find in books like The curious incident of the dog in the night –time, Everything is illuminated and Montecore, but with a flavor all of it’s own.

Samko’s unprocessed racism and homophobia , and his constant satisfied claims that he acted just like everybody else when it came to passing judgement or spreading gossip, gives us an image of the society he lives in. He’s a total conformist, but there’s also reason to his longing back to communist times. For him, and for the bitter ex-party big shot Gunar Karol, things were really better then.

It’s very clever how Kapitanova lets Samko tell another story than he thinks he’s telling, how the reader connects the dots in his stories that he himself is missing, but how she never sells him out for a laugh. Samko Tále is not a likeable fellow, but he’s human and a product of his environment. And his strange book is both crudely funny and sad. I’ll look out for more books by this writer. ( )

An interesting, strange and slightly disturbing small book. The story is told with the voice and from the view of an autistic midget that can't let go of the comfort blanket of communism in post Soviet Slovakia and that slips often into fairly overt racism. He can't form adult judgements of those around him and holds on to his learnt mantras that support his self worth as he goes about his rather odd little daily routine. I don't know Slovakia nearly well enough to judge whether this is supposed to be, on some level, an allegory of how the population more generally is adapting to its recent freedoms. But it is a voice that stays with you when it is gone. (As, in a very different way, did the voice of Owen Meaney). ( )