"Literature about children living under repressive regimes is as upsetting as it is invaluable. One's appreciation for each new book is mingled with horror at what a young person endured to produce it. (…) The latest contribution to this heartrending genre comes from a 34-year-old Romanian (sic!) writer named György Dragomán. (…) The narrator, 11-year-old Djata, is a resilient but sensitive boy living in a world that seems designed by Joseph Stalin and Roald Dahl. (…) Dragomán creates a nostalgic childhood, full of the games and pranks that mischievous scamps have always pursued -- playing hooky, pestering weird neighbors, daring each other to eat this or jump over that -- but in the dark days of Ceausescu's police state, the atmosphere is so poisoned, physically and psychologically, that boys' make-believe dangers constantly risk becoming deadly. (…) Young Djata can't always comprehend the full magnitude of what he's witnessing, but through the simple, vivid voice of these scary and oddly mirthful stories, we can." (Ron Charles, The Washington Post)
"On each page of The White King, Mr. Dragomán subtly suggests a comparison between the indignities of boyhood — humiliation, cliquishness, betrayal — and those of Ceausescu's Romania. Even the boys' trade in toy soldiers mimics the scrappy black market of adults. If communism makes pseudo-children of everyone, perhaps it is only a real child who can find genuine escapism." "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." "Dragomán presents the reader with a world in which Djata’s father is taken away without notice, his house is entered without a warrant, his friend breaks his ankle in order to avoid going to school, and principals threaten that any children not in their seats will 'be impaled and hung in the schoolyard.' Djata, of course, does not realize the totality of the situation; it is up to the reader to fit together the facts and realize the true terrifying nature of Djata’s society. (…). It is this contrast of childhood innocence against ruthless violence that makes The White King interesting." "[Dragomán's] straight-talking vignettes recall the spirited, knee-scraping adventures of William Brown, Huckleberry Finn and Pip. What larks, eh? But, of course, a child protagonist isn't guaranteed an easy ride: in Twain and Dickens there is a palpable tension between the childish world of imaginative freedom and the adult world of darkness, violence, injustice and greed. In The White King, that tension is stretched to breaking point. For its narrator Djata, the horrors of the adult world are everywhere. (…) Like that other child rebel Huck Finn, Djata is an escape artist; like Huck, he refuses to be 'sivilized'."
"The nastiest dictators are the schoolteachers who mete out grotesque punishments to offending pupils, with a cavalier disregard for the confused feelings of adolescence. The bullied boys, Djata included, become bullies by way of response. Djata and his friends – Feri, Janika, Big Prodán, Máriusz – are diminutive bureaucrats, ideal conscripts for the secret police or the one-party system. (…) There is hardly a sympathetic character in The White King. Djata's childhood world is one in which tenderness is only fleetingly displayed: his father enters the story in the most affecting scene and then is removed. Paul Olchváry's translation of this chilling novel reads smoothly, apart from the occasional jarring Americanism. This is a most impressive debut." "Djata's classmates are sometimes his allies, sometimes informers, and it does not take much for a dumb prank to become 'sabotage against the state.' In a series of disparate episodes, the unifying strand is dread, magnified by Dragomán's style of childlike, breathless run-ons and sentences that seem never to end. One scene Dragomán concocts is equal parts Lord of the Flies and Mad Max, a gruesome example of what Manea called his country's 'picturesque mixture of brutality and farce.' To resolve a conflict over which group of kids has exclusive rights to the neighborhood soccer field, the "our-streeters" and the "other-streeters" build blowguns out of PVC pipes, maces out of dumbbells and armor out of cardboard and tinfoil and meet for battle in a large open field of wheat. Their faces are painted with burnt cork, and they fight viciously, not afraid to draw blood. The 'war' is put to an end only when the other-streeters set fire to the field and the men of the farmers' collective intervene." (Alexander Cuadros, The San Francisco Chronicle)
" The White King ends with the father's return in dreadful conditions which nobody has foreseen. Between these first and last chapters come sixteen vignettes, seemingly free-standing, and mostly abstracted from the linear narrative. The structure suggests the way we tend to pluck an episode, a cluster of related encounters, from our past and endow it with an organic unity." Previously on HLO | 
