Shhh! I'm Reading.

While I was reading Barbara Demick’s incredible book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, more than one person sauntered past my desk, had their curiosity peaked by the cover and then proclaimed “wow, that looks like heavy going reading.” When I would respond with something like “oh no, it’s riveting!” they would invariably give me the incredulous stink face. Like this. Aside from the concern I have that otherwise clever publishing people are choosing their reading material based on its degree of cheeriness, it makes me sad that they might miss out on Demick’s book for fear that they’re in for a lot of foreign policy talk about nuclear armament (dear policy wonks: I agree that the above is also very important). Demick’s book is about so much more than that.

To begin with, it’s an incredibly human book. It’s about family, love of all kinds, and the space for either in a country where the government defines every aspect of your life. In that, it isn’t a new story. And that’s a genius maneuver on Demick’s part because it salvages the North Korean story from the outer alien margins and allows those of us in completely different - read: more privileged circumstances - to connect with her subjects. 

Demick takes the reader beyond the staged civility of Pyongyang and deep inside the famine ravaged rural regions of the country. It’s a harrowing study of a country’s people whose regime has a maniacal obsession with presenting a face of stability and abundance, where dissent of any kind can get you carted off to the gulag and where in 1998, anywhere from 600,000 and 2 million people had died of famine. There’s this well known NASA satellite photo of North Korea at night. That’s North Korea at the top; a country without internet or television other than the state propaganda channels that delivers such riveting programming as Kim Jong-il inspecting a rubber boot factory.

It’s an incredible story and there’s no one better to deliver it than Demick. She’s incredibly empathetic and her reportage is crystalline and informed by countless interviews with people who have managed to escape and lived to tell their story. The thing that really elevates this book is it’s author’s willingness to let her subjects’ voices assume their rightful place in the foreground. Demick lends them the stage their regime deprived them off. Oh, and there’s a certain Mrs. Song who may well become your hero. She’s as great a character and as tough a survivor as you’ll find in any book, cheery or hard going.

(photo via the very marvelous blog http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com/)