It is a cliché among journalists to describe North Korea as unknowable. But these six books will help you understand the Hermit Kingdom
communist state, North Korea is replete with the kind of contradictions that Karl Marx thought led to collapse. In pursuit of a paradise for the people it has engaged in brutal repression and caused mass starvation. Claiming to be the only bastion of true democracy, it passes power between generations of a family whose members regard themselves as demi-gods. Protesting against the threat posed by the outside world it has developed some of the most deadly weapons ever created.
Adrian Buzo’s history of North Korea is a biography of sorts, albeit with two subjects: the country and its “Great Leader”, Kim Il Sung. His central thesis is that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, despite its egalitarian name, is the direct product of its founder’s personality and preoccupations.
“Even under the most repressive of social and political conditions, the vast majority of people still attempt to live normal lives and generally succeed.” So argues Andrei Lankov, who has keenly observed North Korea since first visiting as an exchange student from the USSR at Kim Il Sung University in 1984. His “The Real North Korea”, an academic book first published in 2013, gives a comprehensive survey of the country’s history, politics and international relations.
Experts on North Korea’s economy face a peculiar problem: the country has not published comprehensive economic data since the 1960s. So creativity is called for. Kim Byung-yeon tried to fill the gap in knowledge by conducting surveys of defectors, one of the few information sources available. The idea was to go beyond anecdotal accounts of the “marketisation from below” to analyse how the breakdown of economic order affected both firms and government institutions.
In 2001 Guy Delisle, a Quebecois animator, visited Pyongyang for two months to work for SEK Studio, a North Korean outfit famed as a cheap subcontracting option for foreign animators. “Pyongyang” is a graphic-novel travelogue of that trip. It recounts in simultaneously lush and minimalist black and white panels the oddity, isolation and, occasionally, boredom of two months in the isolated capital.
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