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Summary
Summary
The Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times betselling novel of North Korea: an epic journey into the heart of the world's most mysterious dictatorship.
"Imagine Charles Dickens paying a visit to Pyongyang, and you see the canvas on which [Adam] Johnson is painting here." --The Washington Post
Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother--a singer "stolen" to Pyongyang--and an influential father who runs a work camp for orphans. Superiors in the North Korean state soon recognize the boy's loyalty and keen instincts. Considering himself "a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world," Jun Do rises in the ranks. He becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his overlords in order to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress "so pure, she didn't know what starving people looked like."
Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, part story of romantic love, The Orphan Master's Son is also a riveting portrait of a world heretofore hidden from view: a North Korea rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love.
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD * WINNER OF THE DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE
Named ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR by more than a dozen publications, including The Washington Post * Entertainment Weekly * The Wall Street Journal * Los Angeles Times * San Francisco Chronicle
Praise for The Orphan Master ' s Son
"An exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart." --Pulitzer Prize citation
"Mr. Johnson has written a daring and remarkable novel, a novel that not only opens a frightening window on the mysterious kingdom of North Korea, but one that also excavates the very meaning of love and sacrifice." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Rich with a sense of discovery . . . The Orphan Master's Son has an early lead on novel of [the year]." --The Daily Beast
"This is a novel worth getting excited about." -- The Washington Post
"[A] ripping piece of fiction that is also an astute commentary on the nature of freedom, sacrifice, and glory." -- Elle
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Johnson's novel accomplishes the seemingly impossible: an American writer has masterfully rendered the mysterious world of North Korea with the soul and savvy of a native, from its orphanages and its fishing boats to the kitchens of its high-ranking commanders. While oppressive propaganda echoes throughout, the tone never slides into caricature; if anything, the story unfolds with astounding empathy for those living in constant fear of imprisonment-or worse-but who manage to maintain their humanity against all odds. The book traces the journey of Jun Do, who for years lives according to the violent dictates of the state, as a tunnel expert who can fight in the dark, a kidnapper, radio operator, tenuous hero, and foreign dignitary before eventually taking his fate into his own hands. In one of the book's most poignant moments, a government interrogator, who tortures innocent citizens on a daily basis, remembers his own childhood and the way in which his father explained the inexplicable: "...we must act alone on the outside, while on the inside, we would be holding hands." In this moment and a thousand others like it, Johnson (Parasites Like Us) juxtaposes the vicious atrocities of the regime with the tenderness of beauty, love, and hope. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Pak Jun Do lives with his father at a North Korean work camp for orphans. In a nation in which every citizen serves the state, orphans routinely get the most dangerous jobs. So it is for Jun Do, who becomes a tunnel soldier, trained to fight in complete darkness in the tunnels beneath the DMZ. But he is reassigned as a kidnapper, snatching Japanese citizens with special skills, such as a particular opera singer or sushi chef. Failure as a kidnapper could lead directly to the prison mines. But in Johnson's fantastical, careening tale, Jun Do manages to impersonate Commander Ga, the country's greatest military hero, rival of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il and husband of Sun Moon, North Korea's only movie star. Informed by extensive research and travel to perhaps the most secretive nation on earth, Johnson has created a remarkable novel that encourages the willing suspension of disbelief. As Jun Do, speaking as Ga, puts it, people have been trained to accept any reality presented to them. Johnson winningly employs different voices, with the propagandizing national radio station serving as a mad Greek chorus. Descriptions of everyday privations and barbarities are matter of fact, and Jun Do's love for Sun Moon reads like a fairy tale. Part adventure, part coming-of-age tale, and part romance, The Orphan Master's Son is a triumph on every level.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
north Korea may be the most secretive and totalitarian country in the world, as well as the wackiest. As a result, it inspires some of the best fiction and nonfiction, so the upside of the risk of nuclear war is an excuse to dip into literature that offers glimpses of this other world - and some insights into how to deal with it. Thousands of North Koreans have fled their homeland since the famine of the late 1990s, and many are writing memoirs recounting their daily lives and extraordinary escapes. A leading example is in order to live: a North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom (Penguin, paper, $17) by Yeonmi Park, with Maryanne Vollers. Park is a young woman whose father was a cigarette smuggler and black market trader. As a girl, she believed in the regime (as did her mother), for life was steeped in propaganda and anti-Americanism. Even in her math class, "a typical problem would go like this: 'If you kill one American bastard and your comrade kills two, how many dead American bastards do you have?' " What opened Park's eyes was in part a pirated copy of the film "Titanic." The government tries hard to ban any foreign television, internet or even music, and North Korean radios, which don't have dials, can receive only local stations. But the black market fills the gap, with handymen who will tweak your radio to get Chinese stations, and with illegal thumb drives full of South Korean soap operas. I'm among those who argue that we in the West should do more to support this kind of smuggling, because it's a way to sow dissatisfaction. Indeed, what moved Park was the love story in "Titanic": "I was amazed that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were willing to die for love, not just for the regime, as we were. The idea that people could choose their own destinies fascinated me. This pirated Hollywood movie gave me my first small taste of freedom." In the end, Park's father was arrested for smuggling, and the family's life collapsed. Park and her sister went hungry and had to drop out of school, and she survived eating insects and wild plants. So at age 13, Park and her mother crossed illegally into China - and immediately into the hands of human traffickers who were as scary as the North Korean secret police. They raped her mother and eventually Park as well, and both struggled in the netherworld in which North Koreans are stuck in China - because the Chinese authorities regularly detain them and send them home to face prison camp. Park and her mother were lucky, finally managing to sneak into Mongolia and then on to South Korea. Another powerful memoir is the girl with seven NAMES: A North Korean Defector's Story (William Collins, paper, $15.99) by Hyeonseo Lee, with David John. She is from Hyesan, the same town as Park. It's an area on the Chinese border where smuggling is rampant, where people know a bit about the outside world and where disaffection, consequently, is greater than average. Still, Lee's home, like every home, had portraits of the country's first two leaders, Kim Il-sung and his son, Kim Jong-il, on the wall. (The grandson now in power, Kim Jong-un, hasn't yet made his portrait ubiquitous.) Lee begins her story recounting how her father dashed into the family home as it was burning to rescue not family valuables but rather the portraits of the first leaders. There's an entire genre of heroic propaganda stories in North Korea of people risking their lives to save such portraits. Like other kids, Lee grew up in an environment of formal reverence for the Kim dynasty. At supper she would say a kind of grace - to "Respected Lather Leader Kim Il-sung" - before picking up her chopsticks. "Everything we learned about Americans was negative," she writes. "In cartoons, they were snarling jackals. In the propaganda posters they were as thin as sticks with hook noses and blond hair. We were told they smelled bad. They had turned South Korea into a 'hell on earth' and were maintaining a puppet government there. The teachers never missed an opportunity to remind us of their villainy. " 'If you meet a Yankee bastard on the street and he offers you candy, do not take it!' one teacher warned us, wagging a finger in the air. 'If you do, he'll claim North Korean children are beggars. Be on your guard if he asks you anything, even the most innocent questions.' " Hmm. No wonder my attempts at interviewing North Korean kids have never been very fruitful. Lee escaped to China at age 17 and started a new life in Shanghai but remained in touch with her family. One day her mom called from North Korea. "I've got a few kilos of ice," or crystal meth, she said, and she asked for Lee's help in selling it in China. "In her world, the law was upside down," Lee says, explaining how corruption and cynicism had shredded the social fabric of North Korea. "People had to break the law to live." It's fair to wonder how accurate these books are, for there's some incentive when selling a memoir to embellish adventures. I don't know, and in the case of "In Order to Live," skeptics have noted inconsistencies in the stories and raised legitimate questions. So how did North Korea come to be the most bizarre country in the world? Lor the history, one can't do better than Bradley K. Martin's magisterial under the loving CARE OF THE FATHERLY LEADER: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (St. Martin's Griffin, paper, $29.99). Martin recounts how a minor anti-Japanese guerrilla leader named Kim Il-sung came to be installed by the Russians as leader of the half of the Korean peninsula they controlled after World War II. Martin discovers that Kim's father was a Christian and a church organist, and Kim himself attended church for a time. That didn't last, and Kim later banned pretty much all religion - though he became something of a god himself, quite a trick for an atheist. But do North Koreans really believe in this "religion"? Judging from defectors I've interviewed and much of the literature on North Korea, many do - especially older people, farmers and those farther from the North Korean border. That's partly a tribute to the country's shameless propaganda, which B.R. Myers explores in his interesting book, THE CLEANEST RACE: How North Koreans See Themselves - And Why It Matters (Melville House, paper, $16). He notes that North Korea produced a poster showing a Christian missionary murdering a Korean child and calling for "revenge against the Yankee vampires" - at the same time that the United States was the country's single largest donor of humanitarian aid. Myers argues that North Koreans have focused on what he calls "racebased paranoid nationalism," including bizarre ideas about how Koreans are "the cleanest race" - hence the title - bullied and persecuted by outsiders. For a more sympathetic view of North Korea's emergence, check out various books by Bruce Cumings, a University of Chicago historian, like KOREA'S PLACE IN THE SUN: A Modem History (W.W. Norton, paper, $19.95). Cumings argues that North Korea is to some degree a genuine expression of Korean nationalism. I think Cumings is nuts when he says, "it is Americans who bear the lion's share of the responsibility" for the division of the Korean peninsula. But his work is worth reading - unless you have high blood pressure, in which case consult a physician first. Whatever the uncertainties about the accuracy of recent North Korean memoirs, it's absolutely clear that some stories about North Korea are fabricated - because they're fiction. Today's political crisis with Pyongyang is a great excuse to read Adam Johnson's the orphan MASTER'S SON, Random House, paper, $17), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2013. Johnson tells the story of a military man turned prisoner turned celebrity turned villain, dealing for a while with utterly confused American visitors - an account so implausible and bizarre that it's a perfect narrative for North Korea. The other fiction that I'd recommend is the Inspector ? series by James Church, the pseudonym of a wellrespected Western intelligence expert on North Korea. Inspector ? is a North Korean police officer who investigates murders, a bank robbery and various other offenses, periodically dealing with foreigners and turning down chances to defect. Inspector O is a complex, nuanced figure who understands that the regime he serves is corrupt, brutal and mendacious, but he remains loyal. That's because he is a deeply patriotic and nationalistic Korean, and he resents the patronizing scorn of bullying Westerners. I think many North Korean officials today are an echo of the conflicted nationalist Inspector O. Nicholas Kristóf is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.
Guardian Review
When I stumbled across a story last year in Granta magazine, about a North Korean intelligence officer on a fishing ship, I assumed it had to be part of a memoir by a North Korean, so accurate were the details; the rust bucket of a ship without radar or life jackets. I was surprised to see that the story was written by one Adam Johnson, definitely not a Korean name. Johnson is an American novelist who teaches at Stanford University, and the story was an excerpt from his novel, The Orphan Master's Son. Johnson has made just one trip in his life to North Korea, but he's managed to capture the atmosphere of this hermit kingdom better than any writer I've read. The novel follows the misadventures of Jun Do, a North Korean everyman whose name is a homonym for John Doe. Jun Do is raised in an orphanage. He is the son of the orphanage director, who takes his shoes in winter and burns him with a shovel. Jun Do has never been to a park or seen a movie or met his mother - who, we are told, is a singer of such beauty that she was shipped to the capital, Pyongyang. He lives in the remote industrial city of Chongjin, at a time when people are eating bark and grass. "The loudspeakers called the famine an Arduous March, but that voice was piped in from Pyongyang. Jun Do had never heard anyone in Chongjin call it that. What was happening to them didn't need a name - it was everything, every fingernail you chewed and swallowed, every lift of an eyelid, every trip to the latrine where you tried to shit out wads of balled sawdust." Jun Do is sent to the military, first training in zero-light combat in the tunnels under the demilitarised zone, and then on an undercover mission to kidnap Japanese off the beaches. The abduction sequence is based on historical facts; Johnson makes them so intimate you can smell the fear. Jun Do accidentally drowns a girl he is trying to snatch from a pier. "She opened her mouth, as if to scream, and Jun Do saw she had fine metal work all along her teeth. . . . They threw her over the rail. She fell away silently, not a word or even the snatching of breath. Jun Do saw something flash in her eyes, though - it wasn't fear or the senselessness of it. He could tell she was thinking of her parents and how they'd never know what became of her." The girl had been speaking on the telephone with her mother at the time. Jun Do picks up the phone, glowing blue and vibrating, and hears the woman's voice asking for her daughter. "Mayumi? Mayumi?" Jun Do only manages to fail upwards - in this respect, North Korea is no different from anywhere else. His reward is to be sent to a language school where he listens to English sentences through blue headphones and taps out what he hears on a manual typewriter - I would like to purchase a puppy - an exact depiction of the way language is taught in North Korea. This gets him his assignment transcribing radio intercepts on the boat. Johnson's writing is at its best at sea, in some passages as lyrical as poetry: noticing an island where "below raked obsidian bluffs was a steep, glassy black beach whose glint looked sharp enough to bleed your feet", or the squid "tumbling down the chute, the jets of ink, their beaks against the stainless steel, the colors of them, flashing". Back on land, Jun Do is promoted to a more important assignment accompanying an intelligence team to Texas. From this point on, the story gets weirder and weirder. This American writer is somehow more at home in Chongjin than Texas, and although the action quickly returns to North Korea, neither the country nor the character are as convincing. In the second half of the book, "The Confessions of Commander Ga", Jun Do is impersonating a North Korean military hero. Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader who died in December, shortly before publication, appears as a comic opera buffoon in a grey jumpsuit who spouts lines such as: "The Americans would piss Prozac if I surprised them with a pair of these," fingering rhinoceros-horn bookends given to him by Robert Mugabe. The second part of the book is a wild romp through Pyongyang, full of audacity, but more or less conforming to stereotypes about North Korea. As a journalist who has reported extensively on the country, I fear that some readers might have a hard time figuring out where fact leaves off and fiction begins. People are inclined to believe whatever outrage they read about North Korea, but bad as it is, I've not heard of political prisoners being lobotomised with nails inserted over the eyeball or with electrical charges. Even so, The Orphan Master's Son deserves a place up there with dystopian classics such as Nineteen Eighty-four and Brave New World, but readers need to be reminded: it is a novel. If readers want to know more about North Korean prison camps, I'd recommend works of non-fiction such as The Aquariums of Pyongyang, about a nine-year-old boy sent to a camp, or the upcoming Escape from Camp 14, about a young man born in a camp. The truth is that North Koreans who fall foul of this heartless regime die slow, prosaic deaths of starvation or diseases caused by chronic malnutrition. Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea is published by Granta. To order The Orphan Master's Son for pounds 16 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - Barbara Demick Jun Do is sent to the military, first training in zero-light combat in the tunnels under the demilitarised zone, and then on an undercover mission to kidnap Japanese off the beaches. The abduction sequence is based on historical facts; [Adam Johnson] makes them so intimate you can smell the fear. Jun Do accidentally drowns a girl he is trying to snatch from a pier. "She opened her mouth, as if to scream, and Jun Do saw she had fine metal work all along her teeth. . . . They threw her over the rail. She fell away silently, not a word or even the snatching of breath. Jun Do saw something flash in her eyes, though - it wasn't fear or the senselessness of it. He could tell she was thinking of her parents and how they'd never know what became of her." The girl had been speaking on the telephone with her mother at the time. Jun Do picks up the phone, glowing blue and vibrating, and hears the woman's voice asking for her daughter. "Mayumi? Mayumi?" - Barbara Demick.
Kirkus Review
Parasites Like Us, 2003, etc.) darkly satisfying if somewhat self-indulgent novel is Pak Jun Do, the conflicted son of a singer. He knows no more, for "That was all Jun Do's father, the Orphan Master, would say about her." The Orphan Master runs an orphanage, but David Copperfield this ain't: Jun Do may have been the only non-orphan in the place, but that doesn't keep his father, a man of influence, from mistreating him as merrily as if he weren't one of his own flesh and blood. For this is the land of Kim Jong Il, the unhappy Potemkin Village land of North Korea, where even Josef Stalin would have looked around and thought the whole business excessive. Johnson's tale hits the ground running, and fast: Jun Do is recruited into a unit that specializes in kidnapping Koreans, and even non-Koreans, living outside the magic kingdom: doctors, film directors, even the Dear Leader's personal sushi chef. "There was a Japanese man. He took his dog for a walk. And then he was nowhere. For the people who knew him, he'd forever be nowhere." So ponders Jun Do, who, specializing in crossing the waters to Japan, sneaking out of tunnels and otherwise working his ghostlike wonders, rises up quickly in the state apparatus, only to fall after a bungled diplomatic trip to the United States. Johnson sets off in the land of John le Carr, but by the time Jun Do lands in Texas we're in a Pynchonesque territory of impossibilities, and by the time he's in the pokey we're in a subplot worthy of Akutagawa. Suffice it to say that Jun Do switches identities, at which point thriller becomes picaresque satire and rifles through a few other genres, shifting narrators, losing and regaining focus and point of view. The reader will have to grant the author room to accommodate the show-offishness, which seems to say, with the rest of the book, that in a world run by a Munchkin overlord like Kim, nothing can be too surreal. Indeed, once Fearless Leader speaks, he's a model of weird clarity: "But let's speak of our shared status as nuclear nations another time. Now let's have some blues." Ambitious and very well written, despite the occasional overreach. When it's made into a film, bet that Kim Jong Il will want to score an early bootleg.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Imagine a society in which the official political story tells only of happiness and prosperity, yet personal experience reveals the opposite. Imagine the resulting internal dissonance and the ways in which people might reconcile such opposing forces. This is the experience offered by Johnson (Parasites Like Us) in his novel of modern-day North Korea. Following the path of the hero's journey, young Pak Jun Do moves from an orphanage into a life of espionage, kidnapping, and torture, only to be given a new identity as the husband of the Dear Leader's favorite actress. With references to the classic American film Casablanca, Johnson's narrative portrays his hero as he makes his way through a minefield of corruption and violence, eventually giving his all so that his loved ones might have a better life. VERDICT Readers who enjoy a fast-paced political thriller will welcome this wild ride through the amazingly conflicted world that exists within the heavily guarded confines of North Korea. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 8/15/11.]-Susanne Wells, M.L.S., Indianapolis (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
