Characters: n/a
Writing: C
Plot: n/a
Pacing: B-
Poignancy: B+
I've been mildly fascinated with North Korea lately, probably just because it's so hard to find any information about the place — it's perhaps the most bizarre, backwards country on earth. In my research, I came across Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives In North Korea, which sounded like it might address exactly what I was wondering: what are ordinary lives like in North Korea like, and should I envy them? Sure, the title is a bit awkward and nonsensical. (Isn't it a bit like titling a book Not Particularly Delicious: How Enriched Uranium Changed Western Energy Consumption?) Still, Nothing To Envy is a fascinating look into this real-world 1984, even if it's not meant to be a comprehensive one.
Demick, at the time of the book's release, had been to North Korea a number of times herself, though the North Korea government only allows select visitors into its showcase capital city, and allows tours into the countryside only with special government guides. Most of her research for this book was through defectors from North Korea now living in China or South Korea — she says she interviewed over a hundred, as well as various humanitarian organizations and groups, but Nothing To Envy primarily follows six or so North Koreans throughout their lives, up to their escape into South Korea. Much of the book deals with the terrible famines the country experienced in the 90's, and which most North Koreans probably still have to deal with today. As a result, the narrative is paced somewhat strangely, jumping back and forth between its "characters." Demick spends varying amounts of time with each, since some of their stories are inherently more interesting — like a boy and girl who fall in love as children and maintain a secret relationship all through their years in North Korea, yet never reveal to each other how they long to escape their country. Yet both of them do, eventually but separately, and then find each other again in South Korea — except the woman has married and neither can remember what they saw in each other now that there's no longer a tyrannical government keeping them apart. These stories are interesting, but Demick jumps in and out of others, all of which are ultimately about starving, jobless people with little to distinguish their lives, all eventually escaping over the Chinese border. The pacing suffers as a result, with some stories seeming under-developed and hard to tell apart from one other.
I can't fault the book for its content — even when the pacing is a bit sloppy, the stories are always interesting. Demick sticks to these "ordinary lives" and doesn't write much about the government and politics of the country, or anything much outside of the cities where her subjects lived. If there is a major fault to Nothing To Envy, it is the tone it takes, or perhaps just Demick's writing style. She is clearly a journalist and not a novelist, and unfortunately her book reads like it. Her writing never drifts or loses focus, but it's lifeless and even a little cheesy when trying to convey the pathos of its subjects; it doesn't drive the story the way many successful non-fiction authors are able to do. At times, Demick seems to skip narrative tangents that could have explained a great deal more about how these people lived, and since she writes without citations or specific references (because most of the stories were related to her orally), I often felt a strange disconnect as a reader, having to remind myself that this is a non-fiction book. She repeatedly refers to the habit of North Koreans having to forage for weeds and grass to eat, and multiple times mentions that older women would leave their jobs in the afternoon and go into the mountains to collect wild plants. It's a very sad thought, but as an image, it doesn't really click — maybe just because I'm a hiker, but how are these starving, middle-aged women going from an urban center "into the mountains" to collect weeds that barely nourish them? How are they getting there and back in a matter of hours? I was genuinely curious, but perhaps Demick herself could not flesh out all these strange curiosities.
While the writing in Nothing To Envy doesn't give the book the spark it should have had — with such unbelievable, dramatic material — the material is still interesting enough to make this a great read, and Demick does seem to be a good researcher, uncovering anecdotes from her subject's childhoods, and allowing them to open up and speak their minds about the horrors they escaped. In all of this, North Korea as a country comes out seeming the most flat and confusing of all, because it is such a contradiction. Rather than a ruthlessly efficient dictatorship, it is a country where the military cannot afford to give socks to its soldiers. The government is undoubtedly brutal, but from the comfortable distance of this non-fiction account, it often seems naively incompetent rather than sinister. More than anything, it is astonishing that such a a regime still survives, when most have been predicting the country's collapse for over two decades.
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