Amelia Atlas reviews The White King in The Barnes and Noble Review:

“In the world of György Dragomán, it is hard to pinpoint the moment when humor begins to seep into horror. The war games of children, with combat helmets made from stew pots and machine guns of PVC pipes, are steeped in violence; schoolyard lots are casually drawn from gas masks rather than hats. In his debut novel, translated from the Hungarian by Paul Olchváry, Dragomán ventures into the bleak Eastern bloc of his childhood and emerges with a work so guileless that it manages to be both charming and gutting at once.”

The full review is here.

In The New York Times, Danielle Trusonni reviews The White King

In “History and Utopia,” the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran speculated about whether it’s “easier to confect a utopia than an apocalypse.” Utopia and its discontents, so central to Eastern European writers, are central to Gyorgy Dragoman’s darkly beautiful novel. A scathing portrait of life in a totalitarian society, “The White King” is both brutal and disarmingly tender. Dragoman’s answer to Cioran’s question is plain: Utopia creates its own hell.

The full piece is here.

In The Washington Post Ron Charles looks at The White King:

“Dragomán allows himself some room to experiment with tone and style, including a couple of oddly funny episodes and a surreal encounter with a hideously disfigured man who cares for hundreds of song birds in his dank lair. Among the most moving chapters are those that describe Djata’s infrequent meetings with his elderly grandfather, a decorated politician who was forced into retirement by his son’s arrest. Though doing his best to resist this public humiliation and maintain his formal dignity, the old man is clearly becoming an alcoholic, and his awkward efforts to reach out to his only grandson are full of unspoken remorse. At what turns out to be their last meeting, he takes the boy to a favorite vista and parks the car. “He said he’d have me know that this was the loveliest town in the whole wide world, even in this dull gray weather it shimmers and it shines, but he’d advise me to leave it at once if I ever got the chance, to leave and not come back ever again, to leave not only the city but the country too, to leave my home behind. He fell silent, gulped down the last of the beer from the bottle, and then suddenly flung it straight toward town.”

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. ”

The full piece is here.

The San Francisco Chronicle looks at The White King.

“In Hungarian writer György Dragomán’s harrowing novel “The White King,” set in a nameless place understood to be 1980s Romania, we see this distorted industry through the eyes of the 11-year-old narrator, Djata. Djata’s father has been carted off for forced labor for speaking out against the regime. His teachers subjugate instruction to obedience, threatening - and often delivering - violence for the slightest infraction. Coaches, state officials and even army colonels interfere in school sports competitions to ensure victory for the children of high-ranking Party members. 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.”

The full piece is here.

The Tennessean reviews The White King:

“Dragomán finds fresh details to describe the hardships and terrors of life under totalitarianism, with its food lines, patriotic films and disappearances. But Djata’s story transcends the political. From its menacing opening to its heartbreaking final image, The White King is stunning, a debut novel as assured as The Catcher in the Rye.”

The full article is here.

The Harvard Crimson looks at The White King.

“This disconnect from their lived reality and the one the reader sees in the novel seems surreal. Dragomán is able to straddle the fine line between showing us what Djata does not understand and allowing us to understand Djata as an 11-year-old child. We see that he is a victim of circumstance, that what seems ridiculous is actually just depressing, and we sympathize with him. Djata’s environment, written rich with details, becomes heart wrenching, because this is the only world he knows. As he declares that he would give up anything to have his father back, we realize that this child’s deepest desire is, in reality, an exercise in futility. And that strikes deep.”

The full piece is here.

A brief mention of The White King in Entertainment Weekley:

“In a rushing stream of lucid language, 11-year-old Djata narrates a coming-of-age tale from somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, sometime before glasnost. Many of his preteen traumas are universal..”

The rest is here.

In the April 16 issue of the New York Sun Benjamin Lytal takes a look at The White King:

“Though the episodes that make up “The White King” all share an atmosphere of deprivation and cruelty, the novel is both more and less than a story of life under communism. Mr. Dragomán is chiefly interested in the effects of such a life on a boy. He shows us how a boy’s psychology can assimilate sudden, abysmal realizations — that his father is a political prisoner, for example — while the child remains, at his core, a normal boy. He begins to understand the depths of dishonesty and perversion around him — and he also begins to understand sex. Mr. Dragomán’s narrator, the young Djata, shows that childhood can seldom be completely engulfed by tyranny — that toy soldiers always persist outside reality, in their own enduring universe.”

For the full piece go here.

Louise O’Brien reviewed the book in a show called Nine to Noon Books on Radio New Zeland.
She likes a book quite a bit. You can listen to her here.

Tannaz Allaway in the Marie Claire about The White King:

Through a sequence of vaguely connected episodes of boyhood, Dragoman’s award-winning second novel (and his first to be published in English) blends humour, innocence and terror to create a stunning work that touchingly reflects on freedom and corruption.

Read the full review here.

James Cleary reviews the book in the Sunday Sun:

“The experiences of Djata are littered with uplifting moments, stark reminders that beneath the curtain of a communism wrapped around the shoulders of the people, there is warmth and hope. ”

James Proteus in The Glasgow Herald calls the book a “darkly fascinating examination of the contrast between childhood innocence and a totalitarian regime. ”

The review is not online, but here is a longer quote:

The novel is constructed in short chapters that operate as self-contained stories, but with the mystery and tragedy of Djata’s missing father the constant theme. The book’s painful appeal is that the boys’ adventures are enjoyable, even amusing on the surface, partly due to the sardonic misobservations of the child – “it had been a lot warmer ever since that atomic powerplant accident we weren’t allowed to talk about” – and partly because it is just fun to see boys being boys; hunting for treasure, sneaking into cinemas, and thinking about girls. But below the surface always remains our awareness that this innocence cannot survive the regime and that there will be no happy ending. 

(…)

Djata’s is a convincing and powerful voice and The White King a moving insight into a bizarre, tragic period of Europe’s history. 

In The Independent Paul Bailey calls The White King “a chilling novel” and “a most impressive debut”. The full text is here.

A brief review of the book in The Financial Times by Emily Stokes ends with the following sentence:

“At once charming and disturbing, Dragoman’s compelling narrative whispers of political and emotional censorship behind the Iron Curtain, without saying it aloud.”

In the Sunday Telegraph Charles Fernyhough takes a closer look at The White King.

“Djata’s childhood comes alive through its carefully detailed physicality. Dragomán is superb at the paraphernalia of boyhood, and the book coheres around fine itemisations of hand-made toys and touchingly flimsy weaponry.”

The full text is here.

Tom Gatti has some very nice things to say about The White King in The Times.

When my old English teacher tried to teach me the language back in Transylvania, on very special occasions, when I excelled in the drills, she opened one of her cupboards to get some of her treasured yellowed copies of The Times: We would then read a short passage at random. This was the biggest imaginable reward, with a taste of the forbidden. I am not sure that reading twenty-year-old copies of The Times would have actually landed us in trouble, but we certainly felt so. Because of these memories, I must admit to a certain degree of elation upon seeing my own name in that paper:

“…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. This disturbing, compelling, beautifully translated novel - the first by the Hungarian György Dragomán to be published in English, and winner of the Sándor Márai Prize - is set in an unnamed totalitarian, communist regime, based on the nationalist, Stalinist, poverty-stricken Romania of the 1980s where Dragomán grew up.”

The full text is here.

James Smith from Booktrust reviews The White King on the site:

“György Dragomán has succeeded in conjuring up not only a realistic voice for his young protagonist but also a sense of what it means to live in a country in which the state security services watch your every move and can take you away at any time”

The full review is here.
There is an interview as well, we talk about the book, and we look into the issue of translation:

I am interested in the fact that you are a translator from English into Hungarian, but that someone else translated your book into English. Can you explain how that feels?

I have done my share of translations, so I must tell you that being on the other side of the process was a marvellous feeling. I really appreciate my translator’s work, because I know very well how enormously difficult and challenging translation can be. Sometimes it is even more demanding than writing, as you have to take apart and recreate the original text in a matter of months, while you are subjected to the emotional weight of the text in a condensed way.For example when I was translating Beckett’s Watt there was a moment when I felt that translation as such should be impossible, you can give all you have got, but it still won’t work. After a few days of utter depression I realized that my problems were not technical, but rather emotional, the despair emanating from the text was coming down on me. So translation made me live through a genuine moment of the beckettian ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ experience.

In the current issue (January 17, 2008) of The Times Literary Supplement, Paul Binding reviews The White King.

“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 organic unity. Dragomán’s method of presentation here greatly reinforces his novel’s authenticity, for it emphasizes the essentially subjective nature of what he is telling us. The “I” who is recreating the story is himself the product of his culture. Paradoxically, detaching his excursions into the past from any rationally imposed external ordering helps readers to understand the psychological inflicted on him by the world into which he was born.”

To read the full thing, go here.

The current issue of the Kirkus Review has some nice things to say about The White King.

The book got a starred review, with an intelligent summary of the plot which concludes in:

“The novel details almost two years in the life of Djata after his father’s disappearance, years in which children turn almost as brutal toward each other (with a Lord of the Flies morality) as teachers, coaches and figures of authority are toward the children. One vignette has them playing soccer on a radioactive field; another has them playing war games that risk the fatalities of a real war. Then there’s the appearance of the mysterious Pickax, a man whose face has been disfigured beyond recognition and who has some seemingly mysterious powers. Is he Djata’s father? Does he know the fate of Djata’s father?
Dark comedy and enveloping tragedy converge in this powerfully disturbing novel.”

The Mail on Sunday calls The White King a “coming of age tale with a difference”. The review concludes:
“Glimpsed as it is imperfectly, through the eyes of a child, Dragoman’s evocation of a totalitarian regime is all the more unsettling.”

The book was also reviewd in the Metro. Here is a quote:

“Dragomán is sparing with explanatory detail – Djata’s claustrophobic, mono perspective is all we have – but as his story builds, it takes on a momentum that is irresistible, and in which the unspoken story at the heart of the book comes into focus with the force of an all too real nightmare.”

Tibor Fischer reviews The White King in the Guardian.

“Dragomán’s work is an intriguing mixture. The White King is his second novel, published in 2005, but the first to appear in English. It’s narrated by 11-year-old Djata, whose father has been seized by the security forces and is believed to be in a camp.

The novel won awards in Hungary, and it’s easy to see why. It’s the Just William books teamed up with Nineteen Eighty-Four; a superb novel about childhood, schooldays and gang fights, but one that manages to put the world of the adults firmly into focus as well.”

You can read the full review here.

The White King was reviewed in The Publishers Weekly. Here is an excerpt.

“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.”

To read the full thing, go here.