“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 “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.

“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.

Zeus edged the bus in among the pines. No sooner did he turn off the engine than he heard the animals yapping and growling behind the canvas tarp stretched tight across the cage behind him. Taking a kick at the iron grille, he snapped, “Shut up, you rotten sons of bitches.” But his words were meant not so much for the animals, which couldn’t have possibly kept still, anyway, hungry and pumped up with amphetamines as they were, but more so to finally rouse his clients. They’d been asleep for almost a hundred and fifty miles, the man’s head drooping to the side, partly in the woman’s lap, the woman slumped against the fake leather seat and the fiberboard lining the door.

You can read the rrest on the Words Without Borders site.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

The night before, I stuck the alarm clock under my pillow so only I would hear it ring and Mother wouldn’t wake up, but as it turned out I was awake even before it went off, that’s how wound up I was for the surprise. After taking my extra-special nickel-plated Chinese flashlight off the table, I pulled the clock from under the pillow and lit it up, it was quarter to five. I pressed the button so it wouldn’t go off, and then I took the clothes I had put on the back of my chair the night before and dressed in a hurry, careful not to make a sound. While pulling on my pants I accidentally kicked the chair, which luckily didn’t topple over but only thumped against the table beside it. Carefully I opened the door to my room, but I knew it wouldn’t creak because the day before I’d rubbed the hinges with grease. I went over to the cupboard and slowly pulled out the middle drawer and removed the big tailor’s shears Mother always used to cut my hair, and then I opened the lock on our apartment door and slipped out, quiet as could be, not even hurrying until I reached the first turn in the stairwell, where I broke into a run. By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped outside our apartment block, I was warm all over, and that’s how I went toward the little park, whose flower bed, next to the iron spout where people went for spring water, had the most beautiful tulips in town.
By then we’d been without Father for more than half a year, (more…)

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. ”

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. 

Update: the link above takes you to the weekly actual issue of The Word which is allways a pleasure to listen to. Someone was kind enough to to send me a recording of my interview:

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.”

“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.

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.

“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.

“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 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 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.”

“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.

You grew up in Romania, but later moved to Hungary - is that right?
Were there any special reasons for your family moving – and do you think this has influenced your writing?
Yes I was born in Romania as part of the Hungarian minority living there. I spent the first fifteen years of my life in Marosvásárhely, which is a town in the region historically known as Transylvania. We left Romania in the autumn of 1988. The situation in Romania in the eighties became more and more brutal, my father who thought at the University of Medicine (he was professor of stomatology) was accused of ethnic bias and separatism (Romanian socialism was a very nationalist sort of socialism) lost his job, and was constantly harassed by the secret police, (questionings, house searches) and our family was “encouraged” to leave the country. In an absurd way the process of getting a passport and permission for emigration lasted for almost three years, (the harassment did not stop) during this time both my parents were unemployed, so we had to sustain ourselves by selling almost everything on the flea market.
These experiences undoubtedly have made their mark on my writing, my parents treated me as an adult throughout the whole process, and this meant I was lucky enough to have firsthand experiences about the way a closed society works. (more…)

Your novel set in Romania reveals a terribly tough world. Not a very happy childhood. But from the perspective of a child, “from down under,” brutality and dictatorship can be very well presented. Is this why you opted for a child protagonist? Or was it because of the mode of storytelling, because the story sounds more dramatic this way?

These considerations probably all contributed to it, but it was not such a conscious or premeditated decision. All of a sudden I heard the voice of Djata (the narrator of the novel) describing the brutal football training in the Wold’s End chapter and this voice was so powerful and intensive that perhaps I could not have suppressed it even if I had wanted to. More than hearing his voice, I somehow saw through his eyes and I could describe this semi-fictional world as an eleven-year-old saw it or would have seen it. Many people refuse to believe that the book bears only a trace of autobiography.(…)

For the long version, with photos go to culture.hu

“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.

György Dragomán talked to PW about his second novel The White King, a coming-of-age story set in a totalitarian society

Q: Obviously, the first question to ask is: How autobiographical is this novel about a young boy whose father is “disappeared” by a repressive government?
A: Many of the events in the book didn’t happen exactly the way they did in my life, but they could have. My father was not taken away permanently, but he would be taken in and questioned for days at a time. I grew up [in a Romania] that was much like the setting [never named] in this book. But, for example, in the book, I have a scene of boys fighting each other with hammers; that never happened like that, but my friends and I did talk about fighting with hammers and had even picked out what hammers we would have used.
Q: Do you consider this a political book, or a coming-of-age story, or both?
A: I wanted to write about freedom in a society where freedom is not possible. In that case it is political. I spent my youth in a society similar to that of The White King: you are denied the power of reflection. You don’t really realize that your life could be otherwise, which is precisely the way most children feel about their childhoods. (…)

For the rest see: PN online

The Myth of Horror

I wrote the following short piece for the Lahti Writers Reunion
in Finnland. The central topic of the 2007 reunion was “Beauty and Horror” and this made me recall my atttide to violence when writing my firs novel, Genesis Undone

Once I spent nearly two months on trying to describe a scene where someone attempted to beat out the brains of someone else with an iron pipe. I wanted the violence to be as real and as palpable as possible, I wanted the blows to be forceful and brutal, I wanted the urge to kill manifest itself in a tangible way, I wanted the scene to hurt. (more…)

English translation of an interview I gave to Caffeé Babel on the first leg of my Polish Book tour in Warsaw. The original can be found here: http://www.cafebabel.com/en/article.asp?T=T&Id=11310

The Transylvania-born Hungarian author, 34, uses an unconventional narrator to express the horrors of a totalitarian system

György Dragomán appears to be flabbergasted by the popularity of his latest exceptional book, The White King. I meet him as the collection of childhood stories from Communist Hungary, showing how Communism and suffering of the time robbed people of their individuality, has its grand premiere in its Polish edition at the popular ARTistic (meaning more wannabies than artists) pub in the Wola neighborhood of Warsaw.

The bespectacled Dragomán is unusually humble and quiet for someone so hugely successful. The Romania-born author has lived in Hungary for the past twenty years. He has translated classics by Beckett, Joyce and even Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting into Hungarian. His last name - ‘Dragomán’- even means ‘translator’ and ‘guide’ in Middle Eastern countries. Amongst his stories and plays, his first novel Genesis Undone (2002) was awarded the Sandor Brody Award. His second novel The White King was recently released across Europe, and garnered the Déry Tibor and Sándor Márai top Hungarian literary awards.

Goalkeeper avoiding the ball

‘Four years ago, I turned on the television and saw Helmut Ducadam, a Romanian goalkeeper for Steaua Bucharest man who everyone thought had disappeared,’ says Dragomán, explaining how the idea of a child protagonist came unexpectedly to life. (more…)

Worlds out of Axioms
(Expressing the New. My themes and style)

I wrote this short essay about may work for the 2006 Seoul Young Writers festival. The main theme of the festiwal was “newness” which I learned is a crucial Confucian concept in Korea

So far I have written two novels: Genesis Undone (A pusztítás könyve), a book about three days leading up to a genocide, and The White King (A fehér király), a short-story novel describing six months in the life of an eleven year old boy living in an Eastern-European communist dictatorship, from the moment his father is taken away to a labor camp to the moment his father returns as a guest for his own father’s funeral. I consider both works highly experimental, each testing the structural and stylistic possibilities of the novel in a radically different manner.
Writing experimental fiction has not always been my intention. (more…)

The Narrative Paradox

The virus of nothingness in Samuel Beckett’s Watt

An old essay I wrote about one of the most important books in my life, Watt, by Samuel Beckett, which eventually I have gone on to translate into Hungarian.

Watt is not an easy novel to describe, summarise or paraphrase. According to Hugh Kenner this is so “since the style of Watt is the most efficient that can be discovered for expounding that kind of material Watt contains.”1 The text intrudes into the mind of the reader forcing him to begin to think like Watt, in infinite series of permutations. Therefore, Kenner goes along in saying that “the analyst whose stock-in trade is his skill at putting his author’s matter before his reader in pithier or less redundant language will find no purchase here.”2 Form and content are not easily separated, each can and must be explained away in terms of the other, but the circularity of the argument will be closer to the insane attitude of endless investigation celebrated in the novel than to the ordinary world of logic and reason. (more…)

You can email me at:
dragoman.gy[replace with at]gmail.com

You can leave a message in the comments. I’ll try to reply…
(more…)