Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book

The complete review’s Review

M.A.Orthofer

Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book is narrated by the eponymous Samko Tále, a forty-three year-old man-child with a kidney-disease that’s had him on disability all his life (and stunted his growth and maturation: he has no facial hair, and he stands 152 cm—a hair under five feet tall), and “another illness as well that has a proper name”. He emphasizes he’s not retarded—and notes repeatedly: “I’ve got I.Q.”—but his mind is stuck at childhood-level. He also sees things from a child-like perspective, and with a child’s logic. Nuance escapes him, and he bends the often at-odds facts of the world around him to the limited world-view he has built up for himself, making for tortured explanations that nevertheless seem obvious to him. Easily impressed by absolutes, Samko likes the clarity of rules and order; the man he admires most is a protector from his school-days, “Karol Gunár (PhD Social Sciences)”, to whom he tattled about every piece of wrongdoing he heard about (in those still-Communist days), including the fact that his own father listened to Radio Free Europe.

Samko has little understanding of ideology—and with a grandfather who was a staunch Communist and a father who was anything but probably couldn’t orient himself in any case—but he does have a strong sense of right and wrong, and sees (and categorizes) everything in terms of black and white. As such, he’s particularly susceptible to the absolutist claims of Communism and nationalism (deciding that it’s okay to approve of something Czech if it has to do with the times when it was still Czechoslovakia, but now completely embracing the new Slovakian nationalism). As a consequence, for example, Hungarians and Gypsies, in particular, are treated with complete contempt by him.

Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book actually consists of two of his ‘cemetery books’, though the first is only half a page long. He comes to write the second because he had his fortune told, and it said: “Will write the Cemetery Book”. Usually Samko keeps busy with his paper-recycling work, but the rear-view mirror on his handcart has been broken off, and so while it’s at the workshop getting fixed he has a go at writing this second, longer ‘Cemetery Book’. Unsure what exactly to write about, he just jots down what seems to be pretty much everything that pops into his head; he can’t think of much to say about the cemetery proper—but then (though Samko is certainly incapable of understanding this) the ‘cemetery’ of the title is certainly meant to be understood in a much larger sense (filled with both the living and the dead, as well as ideologies (some not entirely buried), etc.), and Samko does manage to describe all that very well.

Samko rambles along, jumping from one event or person to the next in an account that slowly fills in background about him and the community of Komárno, and the changing circumstances as Slovakia made the transition from being part of a Communist state to becoming an independent one. Samko has trouble digesting much of this, seeing it from his na?ve yet ultimately doctrinaire point of view. It makes for an effective exposé of Slovak character and the changing times, the man-child mindlessly revealing a great deal of the local dirty laundry along the way.

There’s some danger in using such a mentally feeble narrator, but Kapitáňová captures pretty much the right tone. More importantly, the story does eventually also reveal the full tragedy of the place and times, culminating in an episode involving Karol Gunár’s daughter, Darinka, a classmate of Samko’s. Much else along the way is (often near-tragically) comic, with Samko both almost buffoon-like and dead serious.

A different kind of country-panorama, Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book is a revealing introduction to small-town (and often small-minded—and not just in Samko’s way) Slovak life, all presented in that eerily convincing child-like way, with Samko’s ignorant innocence—representative, surely, for much more—ultimately dreadfully haunting.

M.A.Orthofer, 10 December 2010,
The complete review’s Review

Objednať knihu v anglickom internetovom kníhkupectve:
https://eshop.qmul.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?modid=1&prodid=325&deptid=19&catid=17