The Orphan Master's Son

This book won the Pulitzer in 2013, deservedly so. This is a fascinating story that provides the reader a glimpse into the bizarro world of North Korea.

I think the story epitomizes the phrase "perception IS reality". The first part tells of the life of Jun Do, who grows up in the orphanage that his father runs. Everyone thinks he's an orphan, because why else would you live in an orphanage, if you weren't. He goes on to become a kidnapper for the state, abducting foreign nationals (mostly Japanese) at the request of DPRK officials (doctors, artists, etc). He then becomes a signal operator on a fishing boat, listening to whatever transmissions from the West he can pickup. Among them, transmissions from the ISS, that he thinks are coming show more from the bottom of the sea (he can't fathom anything flying above the earth). The end of the first part has him being sent to a prison mine because a diplomatic trip to Texas didn't go exactly the way officials wanted.

In the second part, Jun do is no more, he has now taken on the identity of Commander Ga, a national hero, whom he has no resemblance with. But because perception is reality, he is accepted as such. Except by his (or rather Ga's) wife, who is Korea's moth famous film star and the ingenue, of the Dear Leader; Kim Jong-Il

This was a twisted and delightful read. It brought to mind shades of Catch-22 and Dr. Strangelove, as well as a smattering of Walter Mitty. My favorite read so far this year.

Passages that stuck with me...

"The boys stopped at the harbor, it's dark waters ropey with corpses, thousands of them in the throes of the waves, looking like curds of sticky millet that start to flip and toss when the pan heats."

"How to tell the Second Mate that the only way to shake your ghosts, is to find them..."

"To survive in this world, you've got to be many times a coward buy at least once a hero... At least that's what a guy told me one time when I was beating shit out of him"

9/10

S: 5/7/16 - F: 5/22/16 ( 16 Days) show less

I discovered from reading The Orphan Master's Son that I know precious little about North Korea. I can say with a fair amount of confidence that I know a whole lot more after having read this book. (Yes, I know it's fictional but a good majority of it is based on the realities of that country and its people.) I have to admit that it was slow going at the beginning. I didn't feel the push to keep going that I usually do when reading something that is really interesting to me. However, this wasn't because the characters lacked depth. I think it stems from what I mentioned at the top of this post: I was completely in the dark about North Korea and found it hard to connect. I have since done some research into the topic on my own and I am show more blown away by the mastery of Adam Johnson. This is a story of a man without identity. His true self is stripped away again and again by those in power. He is not the master of his own life...and yet...His spirit will not fully submit. For the entirety of this novel, I was waiting for this man's redemption because his suffering was so great and so complete that I felt that it was unfair that he not get his happy ending. I can't say if I was rewarded at the end or not because to do so would rob you of the experience yourself. If you enjoy contemporary historical fiction and/or have an interest in a part of the world that to me has always seemed shrouded in mystery (and really it still is) then this book is for you. show less

The Orphan Master's Son is an uncanny peek behind the North Korean curtain. It centers around an orphan, Jun Do, who starts out dutifully following a series of military and then intelligence tasks. But his encounters with foreign cultures, and particularly America, turn him more independent. In the second part of the novel, he reappears under the identify of Commander Ga--and a series of overlapping versions told through the loudspeaker's run by North Korean state media, a torturer in the secret police, and Jun Do/Ga's perspective itself--fill in his ordeal in the prison camp, escape, and life in paranoid and psychotic Pyongyang.

The depictions of arbitrary despotism, torture and imprisonment are brutal--and remind me somewhat of Mario show more Vargas Llosa's Feast of the Goat and other novels. But The Orphan Master's Son is also very humorous, especially its parodies of North Korean grandiosity ("the longest grained rice in the world!") and paranoia about the rest of the world. And it features a tender love story as well.

Given how little is known about North Korea, a novel written by someone who put a lot of effort into talking to defectors and even visiting the country feels like a reasonable way to get even a tiny insight of a guess into what life is like there. And it is also an entertaining story as well. show less

Riding a crest of enormous praise, this debut novel by an American man about a North Korean citizen is a worthy achievement, and one I couldn't put down for two days straight. Despite twists of plot that in fiction often seem too coincidental, the reader's sympathy and alignment to the protagonist is so rich and deeply felt that these happenstances feel believable, and are forgivable. The book paints a harsh reality of life under Kim Jong Il, and though I think there is much basis for the events portrayed in this novel, it seems still to be a decidedly Western take on those difficult truths. The extremism of the ideology and the brutality of prison camp life and interrogation techniques are undeniable, and feel thoroughly researched. My show more question relates to the premise of the idea of a desire for freedom in the Western sense of freedom, a striving for an unknown entity that is at its core that sense of freedom for this people, who have a long history of oppression and suffering. The book is a page-turning thriller, with gravitas, and an amazing portrait of an exceptional man living under the pressure of exceptional times, undergoing gradual (and therefore believable) changes that challenge his core identity and his pursuit of what it is to be human. Some of his characters, like the Captain and Mongyong, as well as minor incidental characters with mere walk-on roles, like the Japanese girl on the pier, will not soon be forgotten. show less

I finished this book back in April — yes, April! — and trying to gather my thoughts about it gave me a severe case of writer's block that I'm only now fighting through. I find it impossible to be objective about the quality of this book as a work of art, and I still haven't managed to completely unpack all the reasons I experienced such a visceral dislike for it. I should say right up front that this review will probably be useless to anyone who is wondering if this Pulitzer Prize winner is worth reading. All I can do is analyze my own personal reaction, and attempt to understand why I reacted the way I did. So if that's not of interest to you (and for heaven's sake, why would it be?), please skip forward to the next post.

A brief show more summation of the book: Set in North Korea, possibly the most isolated and brutally ruled country left on earth, the title character is Jun Do, a man who somehow finds himself falling ever upward through the hierarchy of his country's totalitarian regime. At various stages in his life he finds himself patrolling the tunnels that connect North and South Korea, trolling the coasts of Japan and China to kidnap innocent citizens to bring back to North Korea, monitoring enemy radio transmissions along the coast, serving hard time in a prison labor camp, and impersonating one of the most powerful military men in the entire country. Throughout the book, events happen to Jun Do almost without his knowledge or active participation, leaving him with a subtle air of bewilderment at his various fates. Some of the things that happen are absurdist in nature, but I found it impossible to laugh at any of it because the rest was so hopelessly bleak.

And that's the crux of my reaction, I think: This book, despite the humor and the ways in which Jun Do occasionally manages to thwart the Dear Leader's plans, is relentlessly without hope. A book about a country subjugated to a madman's iron-fisted rule is unpalatable without some hint of revolution, opposition, or hope for the future. And this book has none that I could discern. The elites in Pyongyang live a sort of high life while the ordinary citizens are caught in the grip of a famine so severe even the threat of being sent to one of the dreaded labor camps isn't enough to stop them from committing the capital crime of stealing — to eat! — the flowers from new graves in the city's cemeteries.

It's rare for me to give such a low rating to a book that suffers none of the usual faults of plotting, writing, or characterization. It is a testament to the strength of Johnson's writing that his book had such an effect on me. This has been a rough spring and summer for me in a lot of ways, and perhaps that's why I had such a strong reaction to The Orphan Master's Son. Caught in professional and personal situations with little hope of improvement, I desperately need my fiction to provide a ray of sunshine right now. And that's just what you won't get from this book. show less

This book. So, Adam Johnson did his research. He read all kinds of first-hand accounts of the lucky people who have escaped from North Korea. Based on those accounts and a lot of imagination, he made a long list of horrible things that could happen in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, then he figured out how to fit every single one of those atrocities into a novel. The title character is an orphan (or not, depending on who you believe), turned tunnel fighter, turned kidnapper, turned translator/spy, turned hero, turned prisoner, turned... Well, you get the idea, and I don't want to spoil the second half of the book.

The subject matter sounds bleak, and Johnson successfully creates the dark feel that one can only imagine a show more totalitarian state must have. And yet, it's funny. This is dark, dark, politically satirical humor at its best. Part of me wanted to not like this novel, because of the endless list of "atrocities to include" that I mentioned above, but I couldn't help but get sucked in. Johnson managed to make me laugh at the same time that chills were running down my spine. Kim Jong-Il made his job much easier, of course. How many real-life characters could be both utterly ridiculous and terrifying at the same time?

Johnson's plotting is equally as artful as his prose. I found myself flipping backward through the novel and then smacking myself in the forehead as I pieced together the little clues he scattered through-out the second half of the book. I felt the second half was much stronger than the first, with multiple points of view (including a propagandized version of events broadcast through loud-speakers), alternating time-lines, etc., but I don't think it would have been as strong without the more straight-forward narrative of the first half to set the stage. show less

This is a book I will long remember. It was not easy to read. It is a powerful dystopian novel set in North Korea during Kim Jong Il’s reign. It is a deeply moving love story. It is a wannabe spy story that is not well developed. It is meticulously researched and its details and rich descriptive writing give it a tremendous sense of place. I cared about the characters, particularly Jun Do/Commander Ga and Sun Moon, but also about several of the supporting characters. I had some trouble with 3 different narrators: an omniscient narrator, a first person narrator, and the propaganda narration from the loudspeakers. The structure of the book left me confused at times; I understood it better after reading the interview at the end of the show more Kindle edition I read. The author said, ““But in terms of source material, I felt I had a duty to fashion the book the way I did. I read the narratives of many defectors, all of whom had traumatic stories to tell. To a fiction writer, how these stories are told is just as important as what they contain. Trauma narratives are hallmarked by fragmentation, broken chronology, changing perspectives, shifts in tone, and absented moments. I needed to capture those elements if I was to conduct a true outlet for the experiences of these characters. And North Korea, I believe, is a trauma narrative on a national scale. The real mistake would have been to force this story into a shape that conformed to a Western reader’s expectations—you know, a nice beginning-middle-end kind of thing.” (excerpt from an interview between the author and David Ebershoff, editor of The Orphan Master’s Son) show less