It's a story, mkay? And it's a 10 year old kid's story, told with vehemence and color and fables the way a kid may see the world around him, not the way we think we understand it. The particular labor camps featured in the story have been basically disbanded by the 80s as far as I knew, buuut anyway. Even though I understood that, it kept pestering me, that the timing of the story (early-to-mid 80's) and the main premise (the hero's father is taken into a forced labor camp by the regime) are not exactly overlapping.
And it is fictional, although it has roots and feeding from reality, but it is still just a story - occasionally amped up by the active imagination of an 11 year old boy (the hero of the book) and picking random elements of our near history to build a world closely but not perfectly mirrored of our own. With Olivia Williams, Fiona Shaw, Jonathan Pryce, Greta Scacchi.
This made it easy to relate to this story on a quite personal level in a lots of places, even if my childhood has been vastly different from his fictive account. The White King: Directed by Alex Helfrecht, Jrg Tittel. Although I did not know it at first (I knew he was from the region, but not specifics) it turns out the author is from my home town and is barely a few years older than me. Of course I have no idea how the book will transpire to those alien to our upbringing and childhood environment. The trip was long enough, the book good and short enough for me to finish in more or less one go and I was happy with the choice - I can happily give this book as a gift. I've started reading this book on a long trip home, as it was one of the few books from an author from my area to be translated into several languages and wanted to read it, before making it a gift to someone else.
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