Toward a North Korea
Reading List
By JOHN WILLIAMS, December 19, 2011, 5:54 PM
The world scanned
Wednesday’s closely guarded funeral for the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il,
seeking more clues about the politics of the most closed society on earth. But
readers looking for insight into North Korea have better options.
The most acclaimed
recent book on the country is “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North
Korea” by Barbara Demick, a foreign correspondent for The Los Angeles
Times. It was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award and took home the
Samuel Johnson Prize in Britain.
In his review of the
book in The New York Times, Dwight Garner wrote:
“Ms. Demick’s book is a lovely work of narrative nonfiction, one that follows
the lives of six ordinary North Koreans, including a female doctor, a pair of
star-crossed lovers, a factory worker and an orphan. It’s a book that offers
extensive evidence of the author’s deep knowledge of this country while keeping
its sights firmly on individual stories and human details.”
In the same review, he
considered “The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the
Hermit Kingdom” by Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh, saying it was “wonkier
than Ms. Demick’s and less reader friendly, but it covers more ground.” He
wrote that the book, based on more than 200 interviews with defectors, “paints
a picture of a restless populace, increasingly dubious about the official
propaganda.”
Bradley K. Martin’s “Under
the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty,” published
in 2004, draws on extensive reporting in North Korea to portray the country and
the father-son dictator team of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Writing in The New
York Review of Books the New York Times columnist Nicholas
Kristof said it was “simply the best book ever written” about North
Korea. “Relying largely on extensive interviews with defectors,” Mr. Kristof
wrote, “Martin portrays North Korean life with a clarity that is stunning, and
he captures the paradoxes in North Korean public opinion.”
If you’re seeking
strong opinions, you might start with Bruce Cumings, a scholar of North Korea
who teaches at the University of Chicago. Jacob
Heilbrunn called Mr. Cumings “a gifted controversialist” whose
“insights are undermined by his penchant for offering excuses about the nature
of the North Korean regime.” In a 1997 review in The New York Times of Mr.
Cumings’s “Korea’s Place in the Sun” Mr.
Kristof wrote, “In reading this book, I had the odd sensation of
disagreeing with much of it while also finding it enormously engaging.”
B. R. Myers, most
famous in literary circles for his
polemical attacks on the prose styles of contemporary American
novelists, has taught in South Korea and has written frequently about North
Korea. He has offered a
full-throated critique (his only kind?) of Mr. Cumings, and published
a book in 2010 titled“The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves
and Why It Matters,” about which Mr. Garner wrote that Mr. Myers “is a
crisp, pushy writer who is at his best when on the attack, and his often
counterintuitive new book attempts a psychological profile of Kim Jong-il and
his regime.”
His review said, “Mr.
Myers has pored through mountains of North Korean propaganda — from nightly
news reports and newspapers to war movies, comics, wall posters and
dictionaries — and he argues that the West is misreading the country’s core
beliefs.” Mr. Myers’s North Korea, Mr. Garner wrote, “is guided by a ‘paranoid,
race-based nationalism.’ ”
The most rare and
therefore most riveting books might be insider accounts of living in the
country, like “The Aquariums of Pyongyang” by the defector
Kang Chol-hwan. President George W. Bush praised that book and met with its
author, and Christopher Hitchens, in a piece for Slate, wrote that it “ought to
be much more famous than it is.” He continued, “Given what everyday life in
North Korea is like, I don’t have sufficient imagination to guess what life in
its prison system must be, but this book gives one a hint.” In“Long Road
Home” Kim Yong details his six years in a North Korean labor camp.
Hyok Kang’s memoir “This Is Paradise!” recounts his childhood
in North Korea before he and his family escaped to China when he was 13. In a
piece for The Telegraph of London, Mr. Kang began: “I was 9 when I saw my
first execution.”
If first-person
accounts are too harrowing, perhaps viewing the country through the lens of
fiction would help. Mr. Kristof has recommended the
Inspector O series of novels, which are set in Pyongyang and were
written by an American intelligence expert on North Korea who uses the
pseudonym James Church. The novels “beautifully capture the attitudes of the
North Korean officials I’ve met,” Mr. Kristof wrote. In January the novelist
Adam Johnson will publish “The Orphan Master’s Son,” about a
young man in North Korea who becomes complicit in the state’s crimes and falls
in love with an actress. Mr. Johnson has described
the book as “a sort of North Korean ‘Casablanca.’ ”
But for readers most
interested in hearing from the horse’s mouth, Kim Jong-il left behind several
books of his own, including “Life and Literature,” in which he
argued, “Literature must show people as they are.”
Sellers on Amazon have
copies available of Mr. Kim’s “On the Art of the Cinema” and “On
the Art of the Opera.” The cheapest used copy of the cinema book is $128.45
(plus $3.99 shipping)
