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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A tough childhood in communist Romania, June 3, 2008
This review is from: The White King: A Novel (Hardcover)
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.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
wonderful and important, June 7, 2008
This review is from: The White King: A Novel (Hardcover)
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.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Touching Portrayal, January 10, 2009
This review is from: The White King: A Novel (Hardcover)
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.
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