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A review by brennanaphone
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
5.0
This book had an uphill climb convincing me to like it. I was extremely leery at the thought of a book about North Korea written by an American, especially one that started each section with somewhat cheeky propaganda announcements from the DPRK government addressed to its citizens. It just felt like it was going to be a moralizing, satirizing, politicizing take that labored through 450 pages with no basis in reality.
Instead I was captured by this book, mostly by the way Johnson creates living ghosts. Each character Jun Do encounters is alive and unique and then gone--maybe dead, maybe not. The world he creates is crowded with hauntings, so that it's not the people you know are dead that get you but the ones whose fates are entirely unknown. Which is most of them.
I also really appreciated the use of lying and interrogation and the way it's turned on the reader. I found myself so muddled by whether someone was being honest, whether they believed their own lies, whether the truth mattered at all--that the landscape of the book itself became one of hazy unreality.
And most of all I appreciated the interview with the author at the end of this edition; he opens to the door to all the research he was able to do (including visiting Pyongyang!) and where the limits of his knowledge about North Korea ended.
Instead I was captured by this book, mostly by the way Johnson creates living ghosts. Each character Jun Do encounters is alive and unique and then gone--maybe dead, maybe not. The world he creates is crowded with hauntings, so that it's not the people you know are dead that get you but the ones whose fates are entirely unknown. Which is most of them.
I also really appreciated the use of lying and interrogation and the way it's turned on the reader. I found myself so muddled by whether someone was being honest, whether they believed their own lies, whether the truth mattered at all--that the landscape of the book itself became one of hazy unreality.
And most of all I appreciated the interview with the author at the end of this edition; he opens to the door to all the research he was able to do (including visiting Pyongyang!) and where the limits of his knowledge about North Korea ended.