György Dragomán’s debut novel, “The White King” (Houghton Mifflin, 272 pages, $24), could be called the best of all fictional worlds. A memoir of communist oppression, it is also an of-the-moment contribution to world literature, representing the childlike combination of wonder and irony currently in vogue across the globe. Authors as geographically diverse as Haruki Murakami, Jenny Erpenbeck, and César Aira have been using childlike voices to navigate sinister terrain with varying degrees of success. There is always the risk that what should seem horrible will only become precious, a species of fairy tale awkwardly bearing the badge of politics. But unlike most such authors, Mr. Dragomán captures a childhood that feels less like a fairy tale than like a real childhood — perhaps because he actually lived it.

Belonging to the first generation to grow up under communism but to come of age, artistically, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mr. Dragomán has found it possible to describe familiar injustices with a lighter, freer hand. Although written in Hungarian (and translated here by Paul Olchváry), Mr. Dragomán’s debut is loosely based on his childhood in Romania in the 1980s, under the Communist dictator Ceausescu. His themes — propaganda, disappearances, a society based on betrayal — have been covered by a long list of world-class writers. Many have even looked at communism through the lens of childhood — most pertinently, Mircea Cartarescu, whose jagged evocations of a pre-democratic Romania throb with repressed, rock ‘n’ roll energy and adolescent stylishness.

But few such writers have made boyhood their primary project. 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.

We meet Djata in the book’s first episode, “Tulips.” Though perhaps too much a tearjerker, it sets up the parameters of “The White King” elegantly: Djata has taken pains to slip out early from bed, and plans to cut tulips for his mother’s birthday. We learn that this was his father’s tradition — but Djata’s father, a scientist, had been taken away, a few months earlier, ostensibly on an urgent scientific mission. Having returned home, arms filled with tulips from the public park, Djata realizes that his mother will only mistake them, heartbreakingly, for a gift from his absent father. But this hyper-poignant scene is interrupted by the arrival of two brutish policemen, who wreck the house, and inform Djata that his father is an enemy of the state.

Common pranks — such as the vandalism of these tulips — in the context of economic and familial hardship which, at some point in almost every story, explodes into the larger and more abstract hardship of living in a corrupt society: This is the bedrock of “The White King.” Episodes alternate between tales of the neighborhood or school and tales that advance the story lines of Djata’s father’s disappearance. He tries to comfort his often uncommunicative mother. He visits his grandfather, once a party big shot, who gives him his first taste of wine and forces him to fire a Luger at an alley cat.

Djata receives mixed messages from the outside world. Most authority figures are sadistic, but some, like a soccer coach, insist that he win, while others counsel that “you need to know how to lose.” The truth lies not in the middle, but outside this continuum of comradely can-do spirit and sarcastic resignation, in the mischievous ethos exemplified by Djata’s more immature friends. It will not surprise readers of the first few chapters to learn that Mr. Dragomán is a Beckett scholar. Djata and his friend Szabi move from activity to activity, eating chalk and drinking suspect water, taunting each other like Estragon and Vladimir. Elsewhere, a man with no eyes in his sockets saves Djata from a bully, only to give the bully a sexualized accordion lesson — all the while projecting a vinegary attitude that, of course, shines like a beacon of sincerity among the communist politesse of other characters.

Many of the episodes here could be replicated outside of the context of communism. Like any boy, Djata is a wad of innocence and guilt — he doesn’t want to share his precious chestnut cake with a peddler boy. But on each page of “The White King,” Mr. Dragomán subtly suggests a comparison between the indignities of boyhood — humiliation, cliquishness, betrayal — and those of Ceausescu’s Romania. Even the boys’ trade in toy soldiers mimics the scrappy black market of adults. If communism makes pseudo-children of everyone, perhaps it is only a real child who can find genuine escapism.

blytal@nysun.com