In English we say "to each his own," and the French say chacun son goût. I have no idea what the proper way to express this in Slovak is, but what we used to say when we lived there was Každá ma svoj faktor; literally, "Each [woman] has her own factor," as in SPF. It came from one of the most outrageous instances of nascent capitalism in mid-90s Slovakia: a billboard showing five female bottoms, clad only in string bikinis, ranging from very pale on the left to tawny and tanned on the right—with the slogan printed across the bottom(s).

The point of mentioning this is not, actually, to expose the lurid epiphenomena of consumerism unleashed on long-deprived central Europeans. It's to say that every culture recognizes that, to use another English proverb, "there's no accounting for taste." On some level, people like what they like, and at some level, it's not a matter of good or bad—it just is.

All of this is my clever decoy in hopes of not disappointing the literati when I say that I did not like Seeing People Off, I did not understand it, and I cannot fathom why it won the 2012 European Union Prize for Literature. Now you know the truth: I'm a Philistine…

If you read my memoir (whenever it is published!), you will encounter a land full of charm, kind people, good food, religious devotion, beautiful landscapes, hilarious teenage romance, high-spirited escapades, and witty exchanges, all set against the backdrop of a fascinating history.

The antidote you may need to all that wholesomeness is Peter Pišťanek’s novel Rivers of Babylon. You could not ask for a more compelling account of repellent people…

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…