Due to the trauma of reading Flowers for Algernon at too early an age, I am not a great fan of books narrated by mentally challenged protagonists. As a result, despite my quest to read all Slovak novels translated into English, this one was a bit of a struggle for me (but at least blessedly shorter than The House of the Deaf Man, which was a struggle for different reasons). What got me through it was taking it, as Kapitáňová evidently intended, as a prism for refracting the social and political difficulties facing Slovakia in the immediate aftermath of the dissolution of communism (1989) and Czechoslovakia (1993); the Slovak edition of the book was published in 2000.

Samko Tále, the “autistic hairless dwarf” (thus the book jacket) who tells the story, was an ideal citizen of the former communist state but now is a floundering fish out of water. Lacking the intellectual resources to question or analyze the society around him, he reflects it back perfectly, devoutly. Conformity, order, homogeneity, obedience, and all of these things without question are his ideals…

On the off chance you haven’t figured it out yet, one reason for this series on Slovak novels in English is because Slovak literature is so poorly known in the English-speaking world. Actually, it’s poorly known pretty much anywhere outside of Slovakia; Czechs might have the only slight advantage. Some few Slovak books have been widely translated—Don’t Cry for Me, for example, and Three Chestnut Horses—but even these are hardly household names in the U.S.

If you spend any time in Slovakia itself, the one name you are sure to come across as the Bright Shining Star of Slovak literature is Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav. Like most famous artists, Hviezdoslav’s life was not nearly as Bohemian (pun intended!) as the movies and popular misconceptions would have it. He worked hard and steadily throughout a stable lifetime. Which is to say, his story would not make a thrilling subject for a novel. But in Ilona: My Life with the Bard, author Jana Juráňová takes this homely stability’s lack of intrigue and ratchets it down a notch by telling the story not of Hviezdoslav, but of his wife…

Horses exercise a great pull on the human imagination, but I like to think Slovaks have a unique imaginative relationship to them. My guess it comes from the commingled wonder and horror of the nomadic tribes who first galloped in from the east a thousand years ago on these great, elegant, fleeting beasts—tribes we now call the Hungarians; and then successive mounted invasions by Tartars and Turks. A distinguishing feature of the Slovak fairy tale is the tátoš or flying horse, perhaps a case where envy turns into art.

In the last Slovak novel in English I reviewed, Three Chestnut Horses, the eponymous creatures are the major symbols of the unfolding human story, and poetic justice is wrought upon the principal villain when a horse he has abused too long finally exacts revenge. In the novel under consideration here, with another plain allusion to the horse in its title, the story begins, rather than ending, with death-by-horse. But it is neither revenge nor justice visited upon an evildoer. Instead it is the chosen method of suicide by the protagonist…

It’s not done much, anymore, to open a novel with a prayer—a genuinely pious one, too, and a prayer that recurs throughout the book, threaded with biblical phrases. Or perhaps I should say, it’s rare to open a novel with a prayer that doesn’t have in mind the proselytism of the already-converted for a particular niche market. Three Chestnut Horses is not sentimental, shlocky, or tidy. It’s a painful story of things going badly wrong, and its final testimony to providence is earned by bearing the cross, not by skirting suffering via clever spiritual tactics…

This should have been a great work.

It certainly is grand in its ambition: a retelling of Slovakia’s history from the rise of fascism in the 1930s up to the present, almost a century in all, from the perspective of one family. Big, epic historical fiction renders the distant past rivetingly present and aims to overturn the convenient and cheap moral judgments we place on our ancestors by illustrating the agonies of their decisions without the benefit of our hindsight.

Krištúfek was clearly going for this kind of effect…