The White King

December 17, 2007
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. 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. Dragomán conveys Djata’s fearful mental landscape with unadorned run-on sentences, skillfully building a totalitarian world simultaneously immersive and repulsive.

February 1, 2008
Three chapters into this work, young protagonist Djata is at practice for his junior soccer team, for which he is backup goalie, when an army colonel shows up and calls for a private meeting. Owing to the recent Chernobyl disaster, Djata recounts, "he advised us goalies not to dive and to avoid contact with the ball because (it) picks up radioactivity from the grass." Dragomán is sure-handed throughout his U.S. debut, in which he contrasts the vitality of the typical misadventures of an 11-year-old boy with the strong undercurrents of fear and cruelty brought about by life under a dictatorship. Set in an unnamed European country partially based on 1980s Romania, where Dragomán grew up (he now lives in Budapest), this is ostensibly a novel. Nevertheless, the episodic chapters read well on their own, and "Jump" actually appeared as a short story in the "Paris Review". While Dragomán stumbles at times in his handling of dialog and the long, out-of-control sentencesan attempt to replicate the breathless flow of preadolescent activitythe novel holds up on the strength of its characters and wealth of memorable scenes. Belonging on the same bookshelf as David Mitchell's "Black Swan Green" and Zsuzsa Bánk's "The Swimmer", this work is recommended for large fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 12/07.]Forest Turner, Suffolk Cty. House of Correction Lib., Boston

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2008
Originally published in Hungarian in 2005, Dragomnsdebut explores the inner life of 11-year-old Djata as he navigates both the everyday epic adventures of childhood and the all-too-real brutalities of life in a totalitarian society (strongly resembling 1980s Romania). Djata is in many ways a normal kid: he likes soccer, gets distracted in school, and hoards small, meaningful items (like the chess piece that gives this novel its title). But the soccer field is contaminated with radiation, his teachers routinely threaten to break knees and smash skulls, and his father has gone missing, taken away in a van for political dissidence. As the casual violence endemic to adolescence is blurred with starkly adult acts of coercion and cruelty, Dragomns characters are drawn to secret, often stolen joys, such asan abandoned screening room. For Djata, coming-of-age means learning to lose things but also to find some sort of internal freedom amid societys carnage. Though undeniably powerful in its politics, this books true beauty is its lucid prose and moments of dark hilarity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)