Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Apr 2008
272 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
This startling and heartbreaking debut recounts the adventures of eleven-year-old Djata in one life-changing year. To be published in twenty countries around the world this spring (2008). Djata doesn't know what to make of the two men who lead his father away one day, or understand why his mother bursts into tears when he brings her tulips on her anniversary. He does know that he must learn to fill his fathers shoes, even though among his friends he is still a boy: fighting neighborhood gang wars, volunteering to dig ditches, playing soccer on radioactive grass, having inappropriate crushes, sneaking into secret screening rooms, and shooting at stray cats with his gun-happy (and politically influential) grandfather.
But this depiction of life in a totalitarian state, the only world Djata knows, is tempered by the sheer, hilarious absurdity of the situations he finds himself in, by his enduring faith in his fathers return, and by the moments of unexpected beauty and hope and the small acts of kindness that mark out any life. As in the works of Mark Haddon, David Mitchell, and Marjane Satrapi, Djatas child's-eye view lends a power and immediacy to his story, making us laugh and ache in recognition and reminding us all of our shared humanity.
"Dragomán conveys Djata's fearful mental landscape with unadorned run-on sentences, skillfully building a totalitarian world simultaneously immersive and repulsive." - Publishers Weekly.
"While Dragomán stumbles at times in his handling of dialog and the long, out-of-control sentences - an attempt to replicate the breathless flow of preadolescent activity - the novel holds up on the strength of its characters and wealth of memorable scenes." - Library Journal.
"Dark comedy and enveloping tragedy converge in this powerfully disturbing novel." - Kirkus Reviews.
"This disturbing, compelling, beautifully translated novel - the first by the Hungarian György Dragomán to be published in English, and winner of the Sándor Márai Prize - is set in an unnamed totalitarian, communist regime, based on the nationalist, Stalinist, poverty-stricken Romania of the 1980s where Dragomán grew up." - The Times (UK).
"Through a sequence of vaguely connected episodes of boyhood, Dragoman’s award-winning second novel (and his first to be published in English) blends humour, innocence and terror to create a stunning work that touchingly reflects on freedom and corruption." - Marie Claire (UK).
"At once charming and disturbing, Dragoman’s compelling narrative whispers of political and emotional censorship behind the Iron Curtain, without saying it aloud." - The Financial Times (UK).
BookBrowse Review
To succeed in telling a story from a child's point of view, an author must do
two things. He must capture the voice in a way that feels authentic but not
annoying, and he must convey adult implications of events over the head of his
oblivious narrator. The White King doesn't distinguish itself with the
first task, but it really stumbles on the second one. The eleven-year-old
narrator, Djata, speaks in simple run-on sentences familiar from other novels
like Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night or
David Mitchell's Black Swan Green. At times, his narration is so
perfectly crafted that he sounds like nothing so much as a grown-up writer of
literary fiction. Here's how a chapter in which Djata's soccer coach
accidentally beats to death one of his teammates ends:
Coach Gica was still standing in the door and Janika was still lying there and not moving, and I thought, maybe he hadn't really died, maybe he'd just fainted, because if he had died there wouldn't be a game and I wouldn't keep goal, and I looked at those real leather goalie's gloves there on the floor next to Janika, and then all at once my tears began to flow, and the ball fell out of my hands, bouncing once and rolling into a corner, but by then Coach Gica was no longer in the dressing room. [33]
Those writerly details—the ball that bounces once and then no more,
announcing at once the death of the boy and the disappearance of the
coach—threaten the vulnerable fiction that we are reading a child's story. Other
times, Dragoman belabors the point so long even an eleven-year-old would tire of
it, as in the first chapter when Djata relates how his father's colleagues come
to take him to a research station in the Danube Canal and the reader understands
what Djata does not, that his father is being arrested. For pages and pages,
Djata relates details about the "colleagues" that he would only notice if he
realized their true occupation, which makes him sound like a clumsy mouthpiece
for the author's plot.
As these two examples also demonstrate, the story is deeply, even ponderously
violent, as it seeks to convey the cruelty of life under a totalitarian regime.
In another heavily symbolic chapter, Djata spends the day with his grandfather,
a powerful government official whom he must call Comrade Secretary, and his
grandfather serves him some wine then hands him a pistol and forces him to shoot
a cat. The book jacket is careful to point out that the novel "is loosely based
on Dragoman's experience growing up in 1980s Romania," but to me the violence
felt gratuitous and its effects unearned. Added together, these faults are fatal
for the book, for I found that I could not trust the world it tries so hard to
depict.
This information about The White King was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Gyorgy Dragoman is thirty-four years old. A Beckett scholar and film critic, he has also translated works by Beckett, Joyce, Ian McEwan, Irvine Welsh, and Mickey Donelly into Hungarian. Awarded Hungary's prestigious Sandor Marai Prize, "'The White King"', translated from Hungarian by Paul Olchvary, is loosely based on Dragoman's experience growing up in 1980s Romania under Ceausescu. He lives in Budapest with his wife, a poet, and their two young sons.
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