August Meeting
August 3rd, 2010
For our book club meeting on Wednesday August 18, we read Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick.
Jacket synopsis:
North Korea is Orwell’s 1984 made reality: it is the only country in the world not connected to the internet; Gone with the Wind is a dangerous, banned book; during political rallies, spies study your expression to check your sincerity. After the death of the country’s great leader Kim Il Sung in 1994, famine descended: people stumbled over dead bodies in the street and ate tree bark to survive. Nothing to Envy weaves together the stories of adversity and resilience of six residents of Chongin, North Korea’s third largest city. From extensive interviews and with tenacious investigative work, Barbara Demick has recreated the concerns, culture and lifestyles of North Korean citizens in a gripping narrative, and vividly reconstructed the inner workings of this extraordinary and secretive country.
Posted in Book Club
I heard someone on the radio recently quoting someone whose name they couldn’t remember, but the quote stuck with me: ‘Non-fiction can give you facts, but only fiction can give you the truth’. Barbara Demick’s ‘Nothing to Envy’ is no doubt a worthy book, shedding light as it does into a dark and closed corner of our globe. It is also, however, repetitious and very poorly edited.
Page 25, paragraph 1: ‘Coal mining in North Korea was not only dirty but exceedingly dangerous, since the mines frequently collapsed or caught fire.’
Page 25, paragraph 2: ‘The worst were in the coal mines, which were hastily dug and subject to frequent collapses and fires.’ (Leave aside the fact that it is not clear who or what the ‘were’ here actually refers to in the context.)
Call me picky but I find that sort of thing annoying, especially in a prize-winning book, which this is, having scooped the Samuel Johnson award for non-fiction earlier this year. The unpleasant sound you hear is the sound of the venerable essayist and lexicographer gyrating in his grave.
‘Non-fiction can give you facts, but only fiction can give you the truth.’ If you want to know what it’s like to live in North Korea, read this book. If you want to feel what it’s like to live under a repressive regime, I refer you to Yiyun Li’s novel ‘The Vagrants’, or ‘The Land of Green Plums’ by Herta Muller.