I just finished Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. I bought this precisely because I wanted a non-sensational account of life in North Korea. I didn’t want to read about nuclear weapons or labor camps.
In many respects, the handful of people Demick interviews do lead normal lives. They go to jobs they don’t necessarily like; the parents worry about their kids’ educations; and the kids struggle against the pressures of school, hormones, and parental expectations.
However, the differences are much more stark and unforgettable.
Most of the people interviewed ended up in Seoul by a string of chance events. They all loved North Korea, and had no long-planted seed to defect. But at the same time, almost all of them learned within minutes of crossing the Tumen River into China how different their lives would be.
When Dr. Kim defected into China, she came upon a bowl of rice sitting on the ground. She couldn’t believe it because “she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a bowl of pure white rice.” Then she heard the dog and realized that “dogs in China ate better than doctors in Korea.”
Everyone in the book dealt with starvation, and those that lived were ridden with guilt over what they had done to survive. Mi-ran, a schoolteacher, was never able to erase the images of her starving students and the reasons why she didn’t share her food with them. Mrs. Song, a doting wife & mother, never forgave herself for her son’s death (this on the heels of her husband’s death the previous year and her mother-in-law’s death two years prior).
Mi-ran later discovered that that the two sisters who remained in North Korea were snatched in the middle in the night and taken to labor camps because she had defected. And several of the mothers were never able to see their children again.
It goes on and on. And these are the lives of the “ordinary lives” in North Korea.
I just spent the entire weekend in Seoul and had a lot of time to read on the bus and waiting for friends. I’ve been reading the hefty 2666, but decided I didn’t want to lug a 906 page book around Seoul for three days, so I brought my nook (which I love and recommend).
I started Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist because I’d never read Tyler before and it had good reviews. I had high hopes, but it did not meet them.
As I read, I kept thinking it would get better; that something would earn my interest — it never did. To me it felt like Tyler wanted to write this cute story with idiosyncratic caricatures of people, but it seems like she didn’t really know what she was doing. So in the end, it felt like an awful mixture of people who made no sense whatsoever. The worst was when the characters would suddenly have wonderful insights into life (i.e., when Macon felt Muriel’s cesarian scar)… not that the characters couldn’t (or shouldn’t) have wonderful insights, it’s just that they never had them until these weird moments that make you think “that seems out of character.”
I felt like I was watching a really bad Kate-centric episode of Lost (like the one where she’s already a convict-on-the-run and marries a cop anyway… okay, all Kate-centric episodes are bad) in which I have to put up with Kate just to get some glimpses of the other characters… but The Accidental Tourist doesn’t even provide any good supporting characters.
Ultimately, the characters were so poorly written that I couldn’t even gain interest in the story, which had a lot of potential in my opinion.
It felt like a poor-man’s version of Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, which is remarkably better on all fronts. Perhaps I shouldn’t compare because they are slightly different, but that was all I could think about the entire time I read this book.
This summer, a few of the bloggers I follow (namely Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein) joined an online book club to read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace… having read a bit of Infinite Jest in the past, I knew I could not stomach it; however, the book club was so popular they have decided to continue it with Dracula.
I’ve never read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and am a bit excited to finally do so.
When I was a child, I saw the movie Fright Night. This movie caused nightmares for approximately three years afterward, ensuring that I would run to my parents room at the slightest sound of what I thought was the un-dead.
Actually, I would lay petrified on my top bunk wondering if I had the speed to make it down the steps of the bed and across the entire length of our (long) ranch-style house to my parents room. Obviously, I was super-fast because I am here to tell the tale… but I must say there were several close calls.
That being said, I am thoroughly enjoying Dracula. You should join me if you can… it’s only one month, and the book is free online or about $7 at any store.
Here’s the trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula… While I do like this movie, it’s also worth it to watch the movie as a case-study in bad casting (i.e., Keanu Reeves). Most of the other actors do well. I love Richard Grant in anything, Gary Oldman is more than creepy, and Winona Ryder does fine — although there are scores that could have done it better. Oh, and just ignore the bad special effects at the beginning…
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I just finished Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. I bought this precisely because I wanted a non-sensational account of life in North Korea. I didn’t want to read about nuclear weapons or labor camps.
