The White King: A Novel [Hardcover]

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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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.

(Publishers Weekly )

An international sensation, this startling and heartbreaking debut introduces us to precocious eleven-year-old Djata, whose life in the totalitarian state he calls home is about to change forever. Djata doesnt know what to make of the two men who lead his father away one day, nor does he understand why his mother bursts into tears when he brings her tulips on her wedding anniversary. He does know that he must learn to fill his fathers shoes, even though among his friends he is still a boy: fighting with neighborhood bullies, playing soccer on radioactive grass, having inappropriate crushes, sneaking into secret screening rooms, and shooting at stray cats with his gun-happy grandfather. But the random brutality of Djatas world is tempered by the hilarious absurdity of the situations he finds himself in, by his enduring faith in his fathers return, and by moments of unexpected beauty, hope, and kindness. Structured as a series of interconnected stories propelled by the energy of Dragomns riveting prose, the chapters of The White King collectively illuminate the joys and humiliations of growing up, while painting a multifaceted and unforgettable portrait of life in an oppressive state and its human cost. And as in the works of Mark Haddon, David Mitchell, and Marjane Satrapi, Djatas childs-eye view lends power and immediacy to his story, making us laugh and ache in recognition and reminding us all of our shared humanity.

GYÖRGY DRAGOMÁN 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 Donnelly into Hungarian. Awarded Hungary's prestigious Sándor Márai Prize, The White King, translated from Hungarian by Paul Olchváry, is loosely based on Dragomán's experiences growing up in 1980s Romania under Ceausescu. He lives in Budapest with his wife, a poet, and their two young sons. 

Paul Olchvary

TRANSLATIONS & RELATED ACHIEVEMENTS

Translations (Hungarian to English)

BOOKS & OTHER LONGER WORKS

The White King (Hung. title: A fehér király). A novel by György Dragomán (Magvető: Budapest, 2005). Translating currently (Houghton Mifflin, forthcoming). Individual chapters published in the Paris Review, Cencrastus, and the Hungarian Quarterly. See also below, under “Stories, Essays, and Other Shorter Works.”

The Complete Guide to Being Hungarian: 50 Facts & Facets of Nationhood. (Hung. title: Milyen a magyar …? 50 Hungarikum). L’Harmattan, Budapest, October 2006. An entertaining little guide.

Letters of Ferenc Molnár to Lili Darvas. Translated on commission from the Petőfi Literary Museum, Budapest, 2004. The correspondence of the famous Hungarian playwright to his actress-wife. Published in Hungarian in Budapest in a lovely volume; publication of my translation contingent on funding, but the manuscript is publicly available as part of the museum’s monograph collection.

Azarel, a novel by Károly Pap. Steerforth Press: South Royalton, Vermont, 2001. Critically acclaimed in the New York Times Book Review, TLS, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post Book World, and similar publications. Finalist for the National Translation Award (American Literary Translators Association).

Live Fire (Éleslövészet), a postmodern novel by the ethnic Hungarian writer Lajos Grendel, who lives in Slovakia but is regarded in Hungary as among the major Hungarian-language writers of recent decades. Kalligram, Bratislava, 1999.

Esmeralda’s Rainbows. Stories by Lajos Grendel. I translated 11 of the 14 works included.) Kalligram, Bratislava, 1999.

The Transfiguration of the Novel and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. (A regény átváltozása és Flaubert Érzelmek Iskolája), by Hungary’s late, great critic and literary theorist Péter Balassa. Akadémia kiadó, Budapest, 1999. Ordered by a number of U.S. university libraries, as are quite a few books by Akadémia, Hungary’s major academic press.

A science fiction “Internet” novel, on commission by a Budapest banker with literary aspirations. Not a bad novel; not great, either.

The Girl without a Birthday (A lány, akinek nem volt születésnapja), a novel by Ilona Kerezsi. Commissioned by Niemetz Translations, Queens, New York (reference available) on behalf of the author, who published this actually pretty darn good, sizeable novel with a subsidy press, Rutledge Books (Danbury, Connecticut), in 1998.

Gypsy Music (Cigánymuzsika), a novel by Sándor Lestyán about the life of Hungary’s legendary, turn-of-the-20th-century Gypsy violinist Jancsi Rigó. Commissioned in 1994 by Niemetz Translations (see above listing) on behalf of a New York City based descendant of Rigo’s first wife who has since made some attempts to sell the film rights.

1 Tulips The night before, I stuck the alarm clock under my pillow so only I would hear it ring and Mother wouldnt wake up, but as it turned out I was awake even before it went off, thats how wound up I was for the surprise. After taking my extra-special nickel-plated Chinese flashlight off the table, I pulled the clock from under the pillow and lit it up, it was quarter to five. I pressed the button so it wouldnt go off, and then I took the clothes I had put on the back of my chair the night before and dressed in a hurry, careful not to make a sound. While pulling on my pants I accidentally kicked the chair, which luckily didnt topple over but only thumped against the table beside it. Carefully I opened the door to my room, but I knew it wouldnt creak because the day before Id rubbed the hinges with grease. I went over to the cupboard and slowly pulled out the middle drawer and removed the big tailors shears Mother always used to cut my hair, and then I opened the lock on our apartment door and slipped out, quiet as could be, not even hurrying until I reached the first turn in the stairwell, where I broke into a run. By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped outside our apartment block, I was warm all over, and thats how I went toward the little park, whose flower bed, next to the iron spout where people went for spring water, had the most beautiful tulips in town. By then wed been without Father for more than half a year, though he was supposed to go away for only a week to a research station by the sea on some urgent business, and when he said goodbye to me he told me how sorry he was that he couldnt take me with him because at that time of year, in late autumn, the sea is a truly unforgettable sight, a lot fiercer than in summer, stirring up huge yellow waves and white foam as far as the eye can see. But no matter, he said, and he promised that once he got home hed take me too, so I could have a look for myself, why, he just couldnt understand how it could be that I was already past ten years old and still had never seen the sea. But thats okay, he said, wed make up for this along with everything else wed make up for, no sense in rushing things, there would be plenty of time and more for everything because we had a whole life ahead of us, yes, this was one of Fathers favorite sayings, and I never did quite get it, but then when he didnt come home after all, I thought about it a lot, and that farewell came to my mind a lot too, when I saw Father for the last time, when his colleagues came to get him with a gray van. Id just come home from school when they were about to head off, if our last class of the day, earth science, hadnt been canceled I wouldnt even have met them, they were just getting into the van when I got there, they were in a real hurry, Fathers colleagues didnt even want to let him talk to me, but then Father told them not to do this, they had kids too, he said, they knew what this was like, five minutes really