The White King: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Gyorgy Dragoman (Author), Paul Olchvary (Translator) "THE NIGHT BEFORE, I stuck the alarm clock under my pillow so only I would hear it ring and Mother wouldn't wake up, but as..." (more)
Key Phrases: homeland defense, prehistoric reliefs, disinfecting alcohol, Iron Fist, Coach Gica, Big Prodán (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Dragomán draws from his eastern bloc upbringing in this brutal, fragmentary novel. Djata is an 11-year-old boy coming to grips with his father's abduction and internment at a forced labor camp. His mother, preyed upon by secret police officers and venal dignitaries, is powerless to save her husband, and Djata's paternal grandfather, an unrepentant Party man, blames the internment on Djata's mother as he spirals into alcoholism and madness. Meanwhile, Djata's excursions in school, among his friends, at sports and in the countryside, almost without fail, are exercises in nihilism and cruelty. Beaten and threatened by coaches, teachers, construction workers and even complete strangers, children absorb the violence and terror and re-enact it on one another. An unremitting terror drives most of Djata's life, even when authority figures are not present. Dragomán conveys Djata's fearful mental landscape with unadorned run-on sentences, skillfully building a totalitarian world simultaneously immersive and repulsive. (Apr.)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Ron Charles

Literature about children living under repressive regimes is as upsetting as it is invaluable. One's appreciation for each new book is mingled with horror at what a young person endured to produce it. How many of us finally understood the ferocity of Sierra Leone's civil war by reading about Ishmael Beah's unbearable ordeal in A Long Way Gone? Last year, Libyan writer Hisham Matar provided a chilling perspective on what it means for a child to live in a state of political terror. In the Country of Men, his autobiographical novel about a 9-year-old boy, describes a family struggling under the rule of Col. Moammar Gaddafi.

The latest contribution to this heartrending genre comes from a 34-year-old Romanian writer named György Dragomán. Published in more than 20 countries, The White King is a collection of connected short stories inspired by Dragomán's experiences during the 1980s. The narrator, 11-year-old Djata, is a resilient but sensitive boy living in a world that seems designed by Joseph Stalin and Roald Dahl. Dragomán creates a nostalgic childhood, full of the games and pranks that mischievous scamps have always pursued -- playing hooky, pestering weird neighbors, daring each other to eat this or jump over that -- but in the dark days of Ceausescu's police state, the atmosphere is so poisoned, physically and psychologically, that boys' make-believe dangers constantly risk becoming deadly.

Except for his weary mother, the adults whom Djata encounters are bizarre or frightening. Government thugs taunt and threaten him. His teachers are joyless and strict, prone to shrieking. The principal threatens to impale anyone who doesn't stay seated during a dull movie. His math teacher makes a student stand on one leg on an upside-down trash can -- and then kicks it out from under him at the end of class. When Djata claims that "other kids had already died in Coach Gica's hands," it seems like the ordinary stuff of gym legends, but then we see one of the coach's sadistic morning practices, carried out with beatings and his special "goalie-terrorizing machine." By the end, the field is covered with slime and blood, but the way Dragomán has constructed the story allows it to reflect ominously on a far larger disaster spreading across Europe.

One of the most powerful stories, "War," begins with an idyllic boyhood afternoon, described in Djata's bounding, adolescent voice, wonderfully conveyed by Paul Olchváry's translation: "Puju and I were lying on our bellies in the wheat field, and it was hot, really hot, sweat was pouring from us in buckets, it flowed right down my face and washed off the black war paint we'd made from burnt corks, the sweat flowed salty and bitter into our mouths but we couldn't spit it out and we couldn't rinse our mouths, no, we didn't have any water with us, neither one of us thought of bringing a canteen along with our weapons." The kids are improvising a rough version of kick-the-can -- with homemade slingshots, cardboard armor and stew-pot helmets -- but over the course of the afternoon, their play slips ominously toward something more sinister, even apocalyptic. The ending, as in several other stories, is exciting and powerful, a shattering statement about the kind of world in which these children and their parents are trapped.

Throughout the novel, which covers about 18 months, Djata is waiting for the return of his dad, a well-connected scientist who fell afoul of the government by signing a petition. He'd been told that his father was going for a week to "a research station by the sea on some urgent business," but in the scene that Djata describes we know those "colleagues" who come to the house are, in fact, secret police; that gray van is no limousine. On one level, he realizes his father has been arrested, but, he says, "I didn't completely believe he was really in a labor camp even though we'd already got a couple of prewritten camp postcards, no, I thought that maybe Father wasn't in a labor camp at all but only working in a secret research institute, just like he told me when they took him away." That conflict between what he hopes and knows runs like a scar through the novel.

Dragomán allows himself some room to experiment with tone and style, including a couple of oddly funny episodes and a surreal encounter with a hideously disfigured man who cares for hundreds of song birds in his dank lair. Among the most moving chapters are those that describe Djata's infrequent meetings with his elderly grandfather, a decorated politician who was forced into retirement by his son's arrest. Though doing his best to resist this public humiliation and maintain his formal dignity, the old man is clearly becoming an alcoholic, and his awkward efforts to reach out to his only grandson are full of unspoken remorse. At what turns out to be their last meeting, he takes the boy to a favorite vista and parks the car. "He said he'd have me know that this was the loveliest town in the whole wide world, even in this dull gray weather it shimmers and it shines, but he'd advise me to leave it at once if I ever got the chance, to leave and not come back ever again, to leave not only the city but the country too, to leave my home behind. He fell silent, gulped down the last of the beer from the bottle, and then suddenly flung it straight toward town."

Young Djata can't always comprehend the full magnitude of what he's witnessing, but through the simple, vivid voice of these scary and oddly mirthful stories, we can.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Tra edition (March 18, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618945172
• ISBN-13: 978-0618945177
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #359,027 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tough childhood in communist Romania, June 3, 2008

By	Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

These are episodes, told in the first person, in the life of Djata, an eleven/twelve year old boy living in communist Romania under Ceausescu. It begins with his much-loved father being deported for forced labour on the Danube Canal. Djata believes his father's parting words that he would soon be back and that in the interval he must be the man in the family for his mother, which he touchingly tries to be.

Some of the episodes show up the violence that permeates this society: a sadistic football coach; terrifying teachers; the desperate need to win in socialist competitions and the corruption that goes along with it; a gang of contractors forcing children to work for them and playing a cruel practical joke on Djata; brutal older and stronger boys throwing their weight around; savage gang warfare; fierce struggles in a food-queue.

In between are episodes of Djata and his friends getting up to the sort of things children will get up to: trying to evade punishment for childish misdeeds; Djata falls in love with a class mate; he and a friend get into a secret projecting room where banned films (pornographic in this instance) can be seen.

Three episodes - one of them involving the white king of the title - have a surrealistic and quite spooky quality about them: in these our narrator has an imagination that is, I think, more that of an adult than that of a child.

On the whole the book makes painful reading: for much of the time the small boy, plucky though he often is, lives in fear of anticipated or inflicted violence. And the longing for his father's return is there from the beginning to the graphic end.

The country in which all this takes place is not actually named; but it was the Romanians who sent people for forced labour to the Danube Canal. The names in the story, however, are mostly Hungarian, so it is probably set in Transylvania, where the author grew up before moving to Hungary in 1988. The period will be between the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and the fall of Ceausescu in 1989. The excellent translation from Hungarian is into American English. The story is told with great effect in a headlong, breathless way, with commas taking the place of full stops and many paragraphs pages long. The book has won many Hungarian literary prizes, and it well deserves them.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars wonderful and important, June 7, 2008

By	K. Greenfeld - See all my reviews

In the tradition of first person accounts that somehow find humor amidst the brutality of childhood, the White King is every bit as fun to read as Tibor Fischer's Under the Frog, Richard Price's The Wanderers, Junot Diaz' Drown, even Catcher in the Rye. This is one of the best books of the year.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Touching Portrayal, January 10, 2009

By	Gaby Chapman "Gaby Chapman for Kids Who Read" (Willits, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

György Dragomán was a boy living in Romania under the communist dictator Ceausecu during the 1980's. In this series of connected short stories that do read seamlessly like a novel, the thirty-four-year-old Dragomán writes from the perspective of an eleven/twelve year old boy whose father, he hopes, has been taken away to work on some kind of important research. The anguish from knowing the darker truth dogs this boy as he races along in his pre-adolescent life as any boy anywhere would--playing made-up games with opposing teams of other kids; getting in trouble in school for seemingly minor infractions, trying to second guess his football coach, noticing a cute girl. Yet this boy's days are made darker from the culture of the cruel police state he lives under. An unrelenting sense of serious danger and no hope for protection underlies every moment in this fast-paced story.

For these reasons, The White King: A Novel, published in March of 2008, has been an instant hit with several of my high school students, mostly boys but a few girls, who are already enthusiastic readers. These students, still struggling to grasp the subtleties of sentence composition in their own writing, are also fascinated with the unusual and extremely effective writing style of this author. Dragomán runs his sentences together for paragraphs and sometimes pages at a time in order to keep his reader at a pace with his young, tense, heroic, pre-adolescent sufferer. He takes license with word usage too (translated) but never misses his target, keeping his protagonist moving and unstable but never falling.

The White King: A Novel is a remarkable piece of writing and a touching portrayal of a child navigating a terrifyingly cruel and yet very realistic environment. While it may not be the first book to give to a reluctant high school reader, I highly recommend it for established high school readers, jaded from reading too much run-of-the-mill fantasy or horror and looking for a book they do not want to put down. Not just for teenagers, this book is also a great read for adults.