The White King
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- £1.99
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- £1.99
Publisher Description
'Disturbing, compelling, beautifully translated' The Times
'Electric, urgent, luminous ... a coming-of-age with a difference' Daily Mail
Eleven-year-old Djata makes sure he is always home on Sundays. It is the day the State Security came to take his father away, and he believes it will be a Sunday when his father finally comes home again.
While he waits, Djata lives out a life of adventure. He plays wargames in flaming wheat fields; hunts for gold in abandoned claymines; watches porn in a backroom at the cinema, and plays chess with an automaton. But lurking beneath his rebel boyhood, pulling at his heartstrings, is the continued absence of his father. When he finally uncovers the real truth, he risks losing his childhood for ever.
With THE WHITE KING, György Dragomán won the prestigious Sándor Márai prize. An urgent, humorous and melancholy picture of a childhood behind the Iron Curtain it introduces a stunning new voice in contemporary fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dragom n 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. Dragom n conveys Djata's fearful mental landscape with unadorned run-on sentences, skillfully building a totalitarian world simultaneously immersive and repulsive.
