Daniela Kapitáňová Samko Tále’’s Cemetery Book Trans. Julia Sherwood 130pp Garnett Press London 2010 Hardback £8.99 (Video from the launch in London on 11.1.2011) Samko Tále is a physically and mentally stunted, forty-three-year-old resident of the Slovak border town of Komárno, who supplements his disability pension by collecting cardboard, and is writing his ‘‘book about a cemetery’’ because an alcoholic at the station pub predicted it. His eddying ‘‘stream-of-consciousness’’ takes in the period from his grandmother’’s wartime acquisition of Jewish property (“‘why would Jews need things like a piano in a concentration camp, right?”), the Communist period and post-independence Slovakia. […]

Daniela Kapitáňová Samko Tále’’s Cemetery Book Trans. Julia Sherwood 130pp Garnett Press London 2010 Hardback £8.99 (Video z prezentácie v Londýne 11.1.2011 tu.) Samko Tále je telesne a duševne zakrnutý 43-ročný obyvateľ Komárna, mesta na hraniciach Slovenska, ktorý si k invalidnému dôchodku prizarába zberom kartónov a popri tom píše ‘knihu o cintoríne’, lebo mu to predpovedal alkoholik pri staničnej krčme. Do víru jeho ‘prúdu vedomia’ spadá povojnové obdobie, keď jeho stará matka získala židovský majetok (‘načo by bol Židom v koncentraku napríklad klavír, no nie?‘), obdobie komunizmu a Slovensko po získaní samostatnosti. Kapitáňovej satira, slovenský bestseller od roku 2000 bestsellerom, […]