Well here we go again.!.! Another magazine article, maybe a series in the Sunday supplement. We book club reader’s mostly crave literary fiction, not textbooks or magazine pieces.
As a journalistic piece of writing, this is an excellent story: well researched; taught me a lot I never knew before; it even got us involved with some of the characters, whose names were changed to protect the innocent. I thought the opening picture of North Korea with its’ lights out at night, versus South Korea looking brighter than Las Vegas, was especially attention-grabbing.
However, this reading becomes boring by Chapter 4, and there are 16 more chapters to go. This is like a front cover article in a magazine that grabs your attention enough to get you to turn to page 16 for the first continuation, but when that in turn refers you to page 202, you realize that you’ve already absorbed 90% of what you are going to get from this piece. It’s time to move on.
Maybe it would work better as a textbook for a current events/Korean history class. At least then you could spread the chapters across a full semester, rather than take it all in within two wee
ks.
This story sets a 10-year low-water mark for depressing books selected for Brown Bag Book reading. Millions are killed through starvation and sheer idiocy; education is taken lower than any marker because it is lies that are taught in schools. By holding back on Western “gadgets,” like computers and cell phones, North Korea is half a century behind the South; and at this point, reunification would create havoc for several generations, if it’s at all possible.
The best outcome might be if China were to trump up a reason to cross the border and take over the North, to provide a two-decade buffer prior to Korean reunification.
Good Luck with that.
{Literary fiction is a term that has come into common usage since around 1960, principally to distinguish serious fiction (that is, work with claims to literary merit) from the many types of genre fiction and popular fiction (i.e., paraliterature).}.We rarely get any of this para-literature and we get way too many non-fiction works. I had to look up the “Samuel Johnson Prize.” Lo and behold, it’s not just a non-fiction prize, it’s a British journalism prize selected by fellow journalists. Actually almost all of the prior ten selections, 2000 to 2009 looked pretty good to me. They seemed to go off the deep end with this one, though. I’ll pass this “Samuel Johnson Prize” blurb around.
{{Paraliterature is an academic term for genre literature, such as science fiction, fantasy, mystery, pulp fiction and comic books, which is not generally considered literary fiction by mainstream literary
standards.}}
As a journalistic piece of writing, this is an excellent story: well researched; taught me a lot I never knew before; it even got us involved with some of the characters, whose names were changed to protect the innocent. I thought the opening picture of North Korea with its’ lights out at night, versus South Korea looking brighter than Las Vegas, was especially attention-grabbing.
However, this reading becomes boring by Chapter 4, and there are 16 more chapters to go. This is like a front cover article in a magazine that grabs your attention enough to get you to turn to page 16 for the first continuation, but when that in turn refers you to page 202, you realize that you’ve already absorbed 90% of what you are going to get from this piece. It’s time to move on.
Maybe it would work better as a textbook for a current events/Korean history class. At least then you could spread the chapters across a full semester, rather than take it all in within two wee
ks.This story sets a 10-year low-water mark for depressing books selected for Brown Bag Book reading. Millions are killed through starvation and sheer idiocy; education is taken lower than any marker because it is lies that are taught in schools. By holding back on Western “gadgets,” like computers and cell phones, North Korea is half a century behind the South; and at this point, reunification would create havoc for several generations, if it’s at all possible.
The best outcome might be if China were to trump up a reason to cross the border and take over the North, to provide a two-decade buffer prior to Korean reunification.
Good Luck with that.
I agree with Peter on this one. I only was able to force myself to read about 50 pages of Nothing to Envy and then I envied so little I put it down. I think I pretty much know about life in North Korea and was not interested in the people in the stories enough to continue reading about them. I just did not care what happened to them. For me the most eloquent part of the book was the photo of Korea. That illustrated the situation and repression in a way that said more than words.
ReplyDeleteAs for literary fiction I just finished reading "the Master" by Colm Toibin, a fictionalized biography of Henry James. That was beautifully written and insightful. There is not much external action but Toibin's writing captures human nature and relationships between people and expresses these with a depth of understanding that I found extraordinary. His book added something to my life.