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aellis0421's review against another edition
2.0
Ack. This was pretty painful to get through. The first half went fast...and was good. Once Pak turned into Commander Ga...it all went wonky. I'm not sure if this book is actually based on fact of N. Korean life...I find it so hard to believe, but that could be because I just don't want to believe that life could be that scary.
I did do research on the famine. That actually happened. I researched the government. I just don't know about the prison mines and the interrogation stuff. Johnson completely lost me when he started talking about the machine with the electrical currents...what was that about???
I don't know. I had a very hard time discerning actual fact from the fantastical.
I couldn't connect. There was no thrum in that part of me that is able to get lost in a book...in the images, in the words. It was very disembodied.
I found Sun Moon detached and cold. I found her very one dimensional. There was no character development for her.
The story jumped too much...and yet while I feel like the author wanted it all to connect back to a central point...it just didn't do that for me.
It was all just...weird.
I did do research on the famine. That actually happened. I researched the government. I just don't know about the prison mines and the interrogation stuff. Johnson completely lost me when he started talking about the machine with the electrical currents...what was that about???
I don't know. I had a very hard time discerning actual fact from the fantastical.
I couldn't connect. There was no thrum in that part of me that is able to get lost in a book...in the images, in the words. It was very disembodied.
I found Sun Moon detached and cold. I found her very one dimensional. There was no character development for her.
The story jumped too much...and yet while I feel like the author wanted it all to connect back to a central point...it just didn't do that for me.
It was all just...weird.
dinsdale's review against another edition
4.0
This book was sad, tragic, and hard to read in parts. I enjoy melancholy and dystopian stories and this fit the bill even though it was based on life in modern day North Korea. The narrative follows the life of Jun Do, a North Korean orphan, with most of the book based on his experiences as young man while an employee of the government. Most of the work he did for North Korea was unpleasant. The story is told mostly from his point of view, with some chapters devoted to telling his story from two other points of view: a young North Korean torturer, and official North Korean announcements made in its citizens' homes. Through Jun Do's eyes, the reader gets a glimpse of the brutality, hunger, and poor living conditions many ordinary citizens face in this totalitarian society. Life is full of sadness and heartbreak, but every once in a while glimpses of humanity showed through the despair. Some of the situations Jun Do creates or finds himself in seemed to be over the top and hard to believe and I wondered if the author was exaggerating a bit. I realized after I read the afterward interview in which the author talked about his research and time spent in North Korea that despite being fiction alot of what took place was based on real life in that country. My favorite part may have been when Jun Do traveled to Texas as part of a diplomatic delegation and was shocked to see that the Americans named their dogs and that dogs ate food out of cans. Also, when he walked down the hallway at the Texas governor's mansion he noticed a series of pictures where the governor's children and wife gradually grew older over the years and was surprised that none of the kids were killed by famine or kidnapped to work on a farm or mine. This book was an excellent read and hard to put down. Highly recommended. I will be looking in to more Pulitzer Prize winning books.
nancyadelman's review against another edition
5.0
I don't even know how to begin to describe this book. It won the 2013 Pulitzer prize for fiction. So there's that. Okay, the story is about Pak Jun Do, the son of an orphan master (as if you hadn't already figured that one out) in North Korea. As the son of an orphan master he is afforded a few special privileges such as deciding which orphan gets sent out on life-or-death missions. The reader never actually meets the Orphan Master. One day Jun Do is volunteered for kidnapping missions. This he does for a few years until he is taught English and is given a spot spying on radio transmissions over the Pacific ocean on a fishing boat. Jun Do has a lot of interesting adventures, and truth be told, the first half of the book is just backstory and character development for the second half of the story. Eventually our hero ends up in a prison camp where he encounters a national hero and has a lot more interesting and complicated adventures.
The story is interspersed with commentary dispensed by the author himself speaking to the reader directly, by loudspeakers. This I thought was a really brilliant narrative technique on the part of the author. Oh, and there are plenty of characters to keep straight, some of which I had to flip back and forth trying to remember where I last encountered this character or another which made the story sometimes slow reading. Finally, the point of view in the second half switches between several characters to tell a story partly out of order. In the end, it's all wrapped up very neatly with no loose ends. It took me a while to read this book, but I really, really liked it. It held a certain power over me for several days and made for very compelling reading. Only after reading it could I tell why it had won the Pulitzer prize, as Mr. Johnson's writing is top-notch and will leave you wondering where the line between fact and fiction is.
The story is interspersed with commentary dispensed by the author himself speaking to the reader directly, by loudspeakers. This I thought was a really brilliant narrative technique on the part of the author. Oh, and there are plenty of characters to keep straight, some of which I had to flip back and forth trying to remember where I last encountered this character or another which made the story sometimes slow reading. Finally, the point of view in the second half switches between several characters to tell a story partly out of order. In the end, it's all wrapped up very neatly with no loose ends. It took me a while to read this book, but I really, really liked it. It held a certain power over me for several days and made for very compelling reading. Only after reading it could I tell why it had won the Pulitzer prize, as Mr. Johnson's writing is top-notch and will leave you wondering where the line between fact and fiction is.
gregz_newdorkreviewofbooks's review against another edition
5.0
(Originally appeared at: http://www.thenewdorkreviewofbooks.com/2013/05/the-orphan-masters-son-glimpse-behind.html)
Welcome to North Korea, where "beauty means nothing" and "nothing is spontaneous"; and where the totalitarian regime of Kim Jong-il never lets the truth get in the way of a good story — indeed, "stories are factual...the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change."
That last quote illustrates the major theme of Adam Johnson's wonderful, terrifying, engrossing, Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel. Only that which the state wants to be true is actually true — in other words, "they lived in a land where people had been trained to accept any reality presented to them."
But the shifting idea of truth is only part of what makes this novel as fascinating as it is terrifying. Indeed, as you read about prison camps and kidnapping, cruelty and starvation, and the basic destruction of individuality, you have to continuously remind yourself that this is not a story about a near-future dystopia, it's an actual, real-life near-present-day setting.
None of that, I realize, sounds exactly cheery — but even so, this is a novel that's hard to stop reading. It's about as captivating and absorbing as any literary novel I've read. At its root, it's the story of Jun Do, an orphan who eventually rises through the ranks of the army, taking on various roles — he kidnaps Japanese citizen, he learns how to fight in the dark, and he is part of a fishing crew, though his role is to man the radio and spy on transmissions from the U.S. and anything else he comes across. An ill-fated trip to Texas to bargain with a Senator sets in motion the chain of events that occur in the second half of the novel.
And you really don't want to know more than that. The second half of the novel winds around and through itself in a awe-inspiringly artful display of storytelling. It's not hard to understand what's happening from the reader's perspective, but if you're a character in the story, you're constantly wondering about the answer to what should be simple questions: What is the truth? Is there any intersection at all between the state propaganda machine and the truth of what really happened/is happening?
All along, in the second part of the novel, an unnamed first-person narrator (one of three simultaneous story strains, all telling the same story in a different way), who happens to be an interrogator, gives us a glimpse into "normal" North Korean life. For obvious reasons, North Korea is under-represented in fiction, but these snippets of story lent some "day-to-day" credibility to the novel. Johnson says at the end of the story, in a conversation with his editor, that most of what's written here is based on the stories of defectors and what he saw on a visit to Pyongyang — but because North Koreans are forbidden from talking to foreigners, Johnson was only permitted to speak with his handlers for the trip. Still, he tells us, he can justify every piece or detail included in the story, from labor camps to kidnappings, and from movies to the blatantly anti-America propaganda (which are often the comic relief parts of this novel). In other words, this is fiction, but it's also as accurate a portrayal of North Korean life as we'll get. Again, this is not 1984 or a Margaret Atwood novel. It's life under Kim Jong-il, and it's utterly fascinating.
Whether or not this is a rightful Pulitzer winner is impossible to say. But I can tell you this: This is a fantastic novel. If you like literary fiction, if you like learning about a culture you probably knew little about, and if you like a story that will often leave you gasping for air, check this out.
Welcome to North Korea, where "beauty means nothing" and "nothing is spontaneous"; and where the totalitarian regime of Kim Jong-il never lets the truth get in the way of a good story — indeed, "stories are factual...the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change."
That last quote illustrates the major theme of Adam Johnson's wonderful, terrifying, engrossing, Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel. Only that which the state wants to be true is actually true — in other words, "they lived in a land where people had been trained to accept any reality presented to them."
But the shifting idea of truth is only part of what makes this novel as fascinating as it is terrifying. Indeed, as you read about prison camps and kidnapping, cruelty and starvation, and the basic destruction of individuality, you have to continuously remind yourself that this is not a story about a near-future dystopia, it's an actual, real-life near-present-day setting.
None of that, I realize, sounds exactly cheery — but even so, this is a novel that's hard to stop reading. It's about as captivating and absorbing as any literary novel I've read. At its root, it's the story of Jun Do, an orphan who eventually rises through the ranks of the army, taking on various roles — he kidnaps Japanese citizen, he learns how to fight in the dark, and he is part of a fishing crew, though his role is to man the radio and spy on transmissions from the U.S. and anything else he comes across. An ill-fated trip to Texas to bargain with a Senator sets in motion the chain of events that occur in the second half of the novel.
And you really don't want to know more than that. The second half of the novel winds around and through itself in a awe-inspiringly artful display of storytelling. It's not hard to understand what's happening from the reader's perspective, but if you're a character in the story, you're constantly wondering about the answer to what should be simple questions: What is the truth? Is there any intersection at all between the state propaganda machine and the truth of what really happened/is happening?
All along, in the second part of the novel, an unnamed first-person narrator (one of three simultaneous story strains, all telling the same story in a different way), who happens to be an interrogator, gives us a glimpse into "normal" North Korean life. For obvious reasons, North Korea is under-represented in fiction, but these snippets of story lent some "day-to-day" credibility to the novel. Johnson says at the end of the story, in a conversation with his editor, that most of what's written here is based on the stories of defectors and what he saw on a visit to Pyongyang — but because North Koreans are forbidden from talking to foreigners, Johnson was only permitted to speak with his handlers for the trip. Still, he tells us, he can justify every piece or detail included in the story, from labor camps to kidnappings, and from movies to the blatantly anti-America propaganda (which are often the comic relief parts of this novel). In other words, this is fiction, but it's also as accurate a portrayal of North Korean life as we'll get. Again, this is not 1984 or a Margaret Atwood novel. It's life under Kim Jong-il, and it's utterly fascinating.
Whether or not this is a rightful Pulitzer winner is impossible to say. But I can tell you this: This is a fantastic novel. If you like literary fiction, if you like learning about a culture you probably knew little about, and if you like a story that will often leave you gasping for air, check this out.
emilypjohnson's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
mysterious
reflective
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
This book is incredible. For starters, it’s an entertaining story from the jump, with multiple storylines weaving together in a satisfying way over the course of the book. The author did 10+ years of research on North Korea, and the book is better for it. It offers really unmatched insight into the “hermit kingdom”. Obviously, this book has some dark themes and is pretty intense. However, it really is so masterfully done - in the backdrop of the brutal and dehumanizing land of North Korea, the author explores what it means to be human, to hope, to love, to be known. I would recommend this book to anyone. It won the Pulitzer for a reason.
pearlsugar's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.25
jennyjjs's review against another edition
1.0
I didn't finish. The story seemed like it would be an interesting one, but i didn't get far. The novel wasn't good enough to endure the language getting worse and the depressing story.
emilyab13's review against another edition
3.0
I’m a little on the fence about this book. I enjoyed the first part immensely, though it is an extremely difficult book to read. Some of the descriptions are so detailed and horrible that I had to actually put the book down. I just feel that towards the end, the author lost his voice a little and the story got extremely convoluted. Overall though, I think it was a very thought provoking novel.