Samko Tále’s
Cemetery Book

by Daniela Kapitáňová
translated by Julia Sherwood
Garnett Press, London
2011
130 pages, hardcover
ISBN 978-0-9535878-9-6

Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book by Daniela Kapitáňová is a searing satire on the “normalisation” era of late 1970s and 1980s Czechoslovakia and the surge of nationalism in post-independent Slovakia and a passionate indictment of conformism, told from the perspective of a physically and mentally stunted narrator in the small town of Komárno.