The White King

The White King (2005), Hungarian author and translator Gyorgy Dragoman's second novel following his premier, Genesis Undone (2002), has been translated into 28 languages. Told from the point of view of 11-year-old Djata, who is waiting for his father to return from imprisonment, the loosely connected stories focus on the extremely violent culture of a country under draconian Communist rule. Dragoman won the prestigious Sándor Bródy Prize in 2003 and the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature 2011 for The White King. Born in Târgu MureÈ™, Romania, Dragoman moved to Hungary in the 1980s while still a child.

The White King is told from the point of view of eleven-year-old Djata, who lives in an unnamed country modeled on the Romania of the Nicolae Ceausescu era. He has recently lost his father, not to death, but to a work camp. His father was banished to the camp as punishment for signing his name to an open letter of protest against the current government—an event that ruins his family. Besides the letter's effects on Djata's father, it also forces his grandfather, a prominent politician, to resign from his party in humiliation.

After his father's departure, Djata's mother is forced to provide for the family; when she is not doing this, she is usually investigating her husband's well-being and determining whether he will ever be allowed to return to the family. She is not helped in her difficult situation by Djata's grandparents, who suspect that she shared her husband's dissident views and prompted him to sign the letter that broke and shamed the entire family. In their subsequent spite toward her, they largely ignore both her and Djata.



However, in one important scene, Djata's grandfather brings him to the top of a hill, beneath which the city spreads. He tells Djata to observe it closely, as if he had never seen it before. His grandfather suggests, “Try looking at the whole thing, all of it as one, as if I was looking at a painting or a pretty girl, to try and see everything at the same time, it wasn’t easy doing so, he said, but if I could do it, then afterward I’d see the world differently.”

Mostly Djata is frequently left to his own devices. In the country where he lives, there is a great disconnect between the government's rhetoric and the actual lives of the people. For example, there is an “accident in an atomic power plant in the Great Soviet Union” that is clearly based on the Chernobyl disaster. After the power plant melts down, Djata is given iodine pills and advised, when playing soccer, to avoid touching the ball, which has become tainted with radioactivity picked up from the grass. Dragoman reveals such tragic and terrifying events in fragments and glimpses, through Djata's naive eyes.

That Djata narrates the episodes within the book is important for understanding The White King's form—not merely its fragmentary nature, but the way Dragoman constructs the prose that fills his novel. Told in a stream-of-consciousness style dominated by long, meandering sentences that, infamously, go on sometimes for pages, Dragoman's book is not always an easy read on technical grounds. But he captures the breathless, wandering thought stream of his young protagonist in an (arguably) accurate syntactic format. As with most stream-of-consciousness novels, the prose itself and its recreation of the internal landscape of the narrator is in some ways as much the focus of the story as the events themselves. The novel portrays a young person grappling with a world that, to him, is familiar—for example, his aggressively violent soccer coach, who routinely beats his students—but to most readers, shockingly inhumane. The tension between the novels' events and the way they are described by the protagonist is the true subject of Dragoman's The White King.



Some readers and critics have pointed out that much of The White King’s impact comes from its reproduction of the violence and dysfunction of Romania under communist rule, and have questioned whether Western audiences that are not familiar with that history will be able to fully connect with the novel.