Ten years later, after countless attempts of getting rid of the vision, I came to realize that, during the years, the original image expanded well beyond the boundaries of a short story, and I had a novel on my hands.

It took almost a week to realize that the only possible way of escaping this vision – by that time I could not call it anything else but that – would be through writing it down, through capturing it on paper.

It was a strange and unsettling experience to see it so clearly with my inner eye, the image has slowly grown on me, grown with me, hidden details kept emerging, small flecks of dust on one of the casings, a small dent in another one, and then slowly the background, a muddy leaf covered hillside, sometime in late autumn. I saw all this with clarity of a dream, yet it was not a dream, it was just a trick of my imagination. I was thirteen years old when it happened, all of a sudden I saw golden shell casings falling to the ground, the copper of their metal glistening in the sun, as the casings spun, almost in slow motion. At the very beginning my urge to write was not driven by any theoretical consideration, it was rather a practical affair, I merely wanted to get rid of an image which was visited on me with the painful clarity of a revelation. Writing experimental fiction has not always been my intention. I consider both works highly experimental, each testing the structural and stylistic possibilities of the novel in a radically different manner. 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.

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

Dragoman gyorgy a feher kiraly