- Hardcover: 272 pages
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; None edition (Mar 19 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0618945172
- ISBN-13: 978-0618945177
- Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 14.8 x 2.2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 386 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #599,226 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
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 )
(Publishers Weekly )
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent book,
By
Ce commentaire est de: The White King: A Novel (Hardcover)
I don't remember when it was the last time that I read a book in 3 days! To me, it brought back some unpleasant childhood memories. I'm glad that Mr. Dragoman wrote this excellent novel about life in Romania under the so called "communism". It shouldn't be forgotten.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews) 7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A tough childhood in communist Romania,
By Ralph Blumenau - Published on Amazon.com
Ce commentaire est de: 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. 3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
wonderful and important,
By K. Greenfeld - Published on Amazon.com
Ce commentaire est de: 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.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Touching Portrayal,
By Gaby Chapman "Let Them Have Books" - Published on Amazon.com
Ce commentaire est de: 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. |
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
