Samko Tále's Cemetery Book

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Daniela Kapitáňová was born on 30 July 1956 in Komárno, a Slovak town on the Danube, opposite the Hungarian city of Komárom. She has come to fiction fairly late in life. She trained as a theatre director in Prague, and directed in both Slovak and Czech theatres. She works for Slovak Radio, writes opinion pieces and teaches creative writing at the University of Constantine the Philosopher in Nitra.

In 1996 she entered a short-story competition: her entry 1926–1996 won first prize and publishers’ interest. Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book came four years later, under the pseudonym of the narrator, Samko Tále, an intellectually and physically stunted creature and arch-conformist who enthusiastically embraces every kind of prejudice under Communism and as it continued in the newly independent Slovakia. This book was a sensation when it appeared in 2000; still a best-seller in its fourth edition, it has been compared to Forrest Gump, and Samko Tále was seen as a reincarnation of Oskar Matzerath in The Tin Drum or Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye — in fact he is a genuinely original creation, who is gradually revealed as reflecting the worst in human nature. Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book has been translated into Czech, Swedish, French, German, Arabic, Polish and Japanese and now appears in English.

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