Après avoir lu il y a peu son livre sur le Tibet, je découvre son premier livre sur la Corée du Nord. Je le termine juste et me demande comment, en interrogeant des personnes qui ont fuit la dictature asiatique, elle a pu tirer une telle richesse, sans avoir jamais été dans la ville qu'elle décrit si bien, Chongjin.
Ce ne sont pas juste des témoignages, mais leur histoire, arrangée avec une grande maîtrise dramatique, mais pour la bonne cause, celle de nous faire ouvrir les yeux sur un enfer invisible.
J'attends le prochain... Superbe !
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WINNER OF THE BBC SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2010
A spectacularly revealing and harrowing portrait of ordinary lives in the world's least ordinary country, North Korea
North Korea is Orwell's 1984 made reality: it is the only country in the world not connected to the internet; Gone with the Wind is a dangerous, banned book; during political rallies, spies study your expression to check your sincerity. After the death of the country's great leader Kim Il Sung in 1994, famine descended, and Nothing to Envy - winner of the 2010 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction - weaves together the stories of adversity and resilience of six residents of Chongin, North Korea's third-largest city. From extensive interviews and with tenacious investigative work, Barbara Demick has recreated the concerns, culture and lifestyles of North Korean citizens in a gripping narrative, and vividly reconstructed the inner workings of this extraordinary and secretive country.
- LangueAnglais
- ÉditeurGranta Books
- Date de publication10 juin 2010
- Taille du fichier3957 KB
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Description du produit
Biographie de l'auteur
Barbara Demick has worked as a staff reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, covering Wall Street and the presidential elections, among other assignments. Her coverage of the war in Sarajevo won the George Polk Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Award, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. She is now a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, where she has reported from the Middle East and South Korea. She is currently based in Beijing --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Extrait
Chapter One
If you look at satellite photographs of the far east by night, you'll see a large splotch curiously lacking in light. This area of darkness is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Next to this mysterious black hole, South Korea, Japan, and now China fairly gleam with prosperity. Even from hundreds of miles above, the billboards, the headlights and streetlights, the neon of the fast- food chains appear as tiny white dots signifying people going about their business as twenty-first-century energy consumers. Then, in the middle of it all, an expanse of blackness nearly as large as England. It is baffling how a nation of 23 million people can appear as vacant as the oceans. North Korea is simply a blank.
North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea's creakily inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin. The lights went out. Hungry people scaled utility poles to pilfer bits of copper wire to swap for food. When the sun drops low in the sky, the landscape fades to gray and the squat little houses are swallowed up by the night. Entire villages vanish into the dusk. Even in parts of the showcase capital of Pyongyang, you can stroll down the middle of a main street at night without being able to see the buildings on either side.
When outsiders stare into the void that is today's North Korea, they think of remote villages of Africa or Southeast Asia where the civilizing hand of electricity has not yet reached. But North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world. You can see the evidence of what once was and what has been lost dangling overhead alongside any major North Korean road—the skeletal wires of the rusted electrical grid that once covered the entire country.
North Koreans beyond middle age remember well when they had more electricity (and for that matter food) than their pro-American cousins in South Korea, and that compounds the indignity of spending their nights sitting in the dark. Back in the 1990s, the U.S. offered to help North Korea with its energy needs if it gave up its nuclear weapons program. But the deal fell apart after the Bush administration accused the North Koreans of reneging on their promises. North Koreans complain bitterly about the darkness, which they still blame on the U.S. sanctions. They can't read at night. They can't watch television. "We have no culture without electricity," a burly North Korean security guard once told me accusingly
But the dark has advantages of its own. Especially if you are a teenager dating somebody you can't be seen with.
When adults go to bed, sometimes as early as 7:00 p.m. in winter, it is easy enough to slip out of the house. The darkness confers measures of privacy and freedom as hard to come by in North Korea as electricity. Wrapped in a magic cloak of invisibility, you can do what you like without worrying about the prying eyes of parents, neighbors, or secret police.
I met many North Koreans who told me how much they learned to love the darkness, but it was the story of one teenage girl and her boyfriend that impressed me most. She was twelve years old when she met a young man three years older from a neighboring town. Her family was low-ranking in the byzantine system of social controls in place in North Korea. To be seen in public together would damage the boy's career prospects as well as her reputation as a virtuous young woman. So their dates consisted entirely of long walks in the dark. There was nothing else to do anyway; by the time they started dating in earnest in the early 1990s, none of the restaurants or cinemas were operating because of the lack of power.
They would meet after dinner. The girl had instructed her boyfriend not to knock on the front door and risk questions from her older sisters, younger brother, or the nosy neighbors. They lived squeezed together in a long, narrow building behind which was a common outhouse shared by a dozen families. The houses were set off from the street by a white wall, just above eye level in height. The boy found a spot behind the wall where nobody would notice him as the light seeped out of the day. The clatter of the neighbors washing the dishes or using the toilet masked the sound of his footsteps. He would wait hours for her, maybe two or three. It didn't matter. The cadence of life is slower in North Korea. Nobody owned a watch.
The girl would emerge just as soon as she could extricate herself from the family. Stepping outside, she would peer into the darkness, unable to see him at first but sensing with certainty his presence. She wouldn't bother with makeup—no one needs it in the dark. Sometimes she just wore her school uniform: a royal blue skirt cut modestly below the knees, a white blouse and red bow tie, all of it made from a crinkly synthetic material. She was young enough not to fret about her appearance.
At first, they would walk in silence, then their voices would gradually rise to whispers and then to normal conversational levels as they left the village and relaxed into the night. They maintained an arm's-length distance from each other until they were sure they wouldn't be spotted.
Just outside the town, the road headed into a thicket of trees to the grounds of a hot-spring resort. It was once a resort of some renown; its 130-degree waters used to draw busloads of Chinese tourists in search of cures for arthritis and diabetes, but by now it rarely operated. The entrance featured a rectangular reflecting pond rimmed by a stone wall. The paths cutting through the grounds were lined with pine trees, Japanese maples, and the girl's favorites—the ginkgo trees that in autumn shed delicate mustard-yellow leaves in the shape of perfect Oriental fans. On the surrounding hills, the trees had been decimated by people foraging for firewood, but the trees at the hot springs were so beautiful that the locals respected them and left them alone.
Otherwise the grounds were poorly maintained. The trees were untrimmed, stone benches cracked, paving stones missing like rotten teeth. By the mid-1990s, nearly everything in North Korea was worn out, broken, malfunctioning. The country had seen better days. But the imperfections were not so glaring at night. The hot-springs pool, murky and choked with weeds, was luminous with the reflection of the sky above.
The night sky in North Korea is a sight to behold. It might be the most brilliant in Northeast Asia, the only place spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent. In the old days, North Korean factories contributed their share to the cloud cover, but no longer. No artificial lighting competes with the intensity of the stars etched into its sky.
The young couple would walk through the night, scattering ginkgo leaves in their wake. What did they talk about? Their families, their classmates, books they had read—whatever the topic, it was endlessly fascinating. Years later, when I asked the girl about the happiest memories of her life, she told me of those nights.
This is not the sort of thing that shows up in satellite photographs. Whether in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or in the East Asian studies department of a university, people usually analyze North Korea from afar. They don't stop to think that in the middle of this black hole, in this bleak, dark country where millions have died of starvation, there is also love.
by the time I met this girl, she was a woman, thirty-one years old. Mi-ran (as I will call her for the purposes of this book) had defected six years earlier and was living in South Korea. I had requested an interview with her for an article I was writing about North Korean defectors.
In 2004, I was posted in Seoul as bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. My job was to cover the entire Korean peninsula. South Korea was easy. It was the twelfth-largest economic power, a thriving if sometimes raucous democracy, with one of the most aggressive press corps in Asia. Government officials gave reporters their mobile telephone numbers and didn't mind being called at off-hours. North Korea was at the other extreme. North Korea's communications with the outside world were largely confined to tirades spat out by the Korean Central News Agency, nicknamed the "Great Vituperator" for its ridiculous bombast about the "imperialist Yankee bastards." The United States had fought on South Korea's behalf in the 1950–1953 Korean War, the first great conflagration of the Cold War, and still had forty thousand troops stationed there. For North Korea, it was as though the war had never ended, the animus was so raw and fresh.
U.S. citizens were only rarely admitted to North Korea and American journalists even less frequently. When I finally got a visa to visit Pyongyang in 2005, myself and a colleague were led along a well-worn path of monuments to the glorious leadership of Kim Jong-il and his late father, Kim Il-sung. At all times, we were chaperoned by two skinny men in dark suits, both named Mr. Park. (North Korea takes the precaution of assigning two "minders" to foreign visitors, one to watch the other so that they can't be bribed.) The minders spoke the same stilted rhetoric of the official news service. ("Thanks to our dear leader Kim Jong-il" was a phrase inserted with strange regularity into our conversations.) They rarely made eye contact when they spoke to us, and I wondered if they believed what they said. What were they really thinking? Did they love their leader as much as they claimed? Did they have enough food to eat? What did they do when they came home from work? What was it like to live in the world's most repressive regime?
If I wanted answers to my questions, it was clear I wasn't going to get them inside North Korea. I had to talk to people who had left— defectors.
In 2004, Mi-ran was living in Suwon, a city twenty miles south of Seoul, bright and chaotic. Suwon is home to Samsung Electronics and a cluster of manufacturing complexes producing objects most North Koreans would be stumped to identify—computer monitors, CD-ROMs, digital televisions, flash-memory sticks. (A statistic one often sees quoted is that the economic disparity between the Koreas is at least four times greater than that between East and West Germany at the time of German reunification in 1990.) The place is loud and cluttered, a cacophony of mismatched colors and sounds. As in most South Korean cities, the architecture is an amalgam of ugly concrete boxes topped with garish signage. High-rise apartments radiate for miles away from a congested downtown lined with Dunkin' Donuts and Pizza Huts and a host of Korean knockoffs. The backstreets are filled with love hotels with names like Eros Motel and Love-Inn Park that advertise rooms by the hour. The customary state of traffic is gridlock as thousands of Hyundais—more fruit of the economic miracle— try to plow their way between home and the malls. Because the city is in a perpetual state of gridlock, I took the train down from Seoul, a thirty-minute ride, then crawled along in a taxi to one of the few tranquil spots in town, a grilled beef-ribs restaurant across from an eighteenth-century fortress.
At first I didn't spot Mi-ran. She looked quite unlike the other North Koreans I had met. There were by that time some six thousand North Korean defectors living in South Korea and there were usually telltale signs of their difficulty in assimilating—skirts worn too short, labels still attached to new clothes—but Mi-ran was indistinguishable from a South Korean. She wore a chic brown sweater set and matching knit trousers. It gave me the impression (which like many others would prove wrong) that she was rather demure. Her hair was swept back and neatly held in place with a rhinestone barrette. Her impeccable appearance was marred only by a smattering of acne on her chin and a heaviness around the middle, the result of being three months pregnant. A year earlier she had married a South Korean, a civilian military employee, and they were expecting their first child.
I had asked Mi-ran to lunch in order to learn more about North Korea's school system. In the years before her defection, she had worked as a kindergarten teacher in a mining town. In South Korea she was working toward a graduate degree in education. It was a serious conversation, at times grim. The food on our table went uneaten as she described watching her five- and six-year-old pupils die of starvation. As her students were dying, she was supposed to teach them that they were blessed to be North Korean. Kim Il-sung, who ruled from the time the peninsula was severed at the end of World War II until his death in 1994, was to be revered as a god, and Kim Jong- il, his son and successor, as the son of a god, a Christ-like figure. Mi-ran had become a harsh critic of the North Korean system of brainwashing.
After an hour or two of such conversation, we veered into what might be disparaged as typical girl talk. There was something about Mi- ran's self-possession and her candor that allowed me to ask more personal questions. What did young North Koreans do for fun? Were there any happy moments in her life in North Korea? Did she have a boyfriend there?
"It's funny you ask," she said. "I had a dream about him the other night."
She described the boy as tall and limber with shaggy hair flopping over his forehead. After she got out of North Korea, she was delighted to discover that there was a South Korean teen idol by the name of Yu Jun-sang who looked quite like her ex-boyfriend. (As a result, I have used the pseudonym Jun-sang to identify him.) He was smart, too, a future scientist studying at one of the best universities in Pyongyang. That was one of the reasons they could not be seen in public. Their relationship could have damaged his career prospects.
There are no love hotels in North Korea. Casual intimacy between the sexes is discouraged. Still, I tried to pry gently about how far the relationship went. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition paperback.
If you look at satellite photographs of the far east by night, you'll see a large splotch curiously lacking in light. This area of darkness is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Next to this mysterious black hole, South Korea, Japan, and now China fairly gleam with prosperity. Even from hundreds of miles above, the billboards, the headlights and streetlights, the neon of the fast- food chains appear as tiny white dots signifying people going about their business as twenty-first-century energy consumers. Then, in the middle of it all, an expanse of blackness nearly as large as England. It is baffling how a nation of 23 million people can appear as vacant as the oceans. North Korea is simply a blank.
North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea's creakily inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin. The lights went out. Hungry people scaled utility poles to pilfer bits of copper wire to swap for food. When the sun drops low in the sky, the landscape fades to gray and the squat little houses are swallowed up by the night. Entire villages vanish into the dusk. Even in parts of the showcase capital of Pyongyang, you can stroll down the middle of a main street at night without being able to see the buildings on either side.
When outsiders stare into the void that is today's North Korea, they think of remote villages of Africa or Southeast Asia where the civilizing hand of electricity has not yet reached. But North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world. You can see the evidence of what once was and what has been lost dangling overhead alongside any major North Korean road—the skeletal wires of the rusted electrical grid that once covered the entire country.
North Koreans beyond middle age remember well when they had more electricity (and for that matter food) than their pro-American cousins in South Korea, and that compounds the indignity of spending their nights sitting in the dark. Back in the 1990s, the U.S. offered to help North Korea with its energy needs if it gave up its nuclear weapons program. But the deal fell apart after the Bush administration accused the North Koreans of reneging on their promises. North Koreans complain bitterly about the darkness, which they still blame on the U.S. sanctions. They can't read at night. They can't watch television. "We have no culture without electricity," a burly North Korean security guard once told me accusingly
But the dark has advantages of its own. Especially if you are a teenager dating somebody you can't be seen with.
When adults go to bed, sometimes as early as 7:00 p.m. in winter, it is easy enough to slip out of the house. The darkness confers measures of privacy and freedom as hard to come by in North Korea as electricity. Wrapped in a magic cloak of invisibility, you can do what you like without worrying about the prying eyes of parents, neighbors, or secret police.
I met many North Koreans who told me how much they learned to love the darkness, but it was the story of one teenage girl and her boyfriend that impressed me most. She was twelve years old when she met a young man three years older from a neighboring town. Her family was low-ranking in the byzantine system of social controls in place in North Korea. To be seen in public together would damage the boy's career prospects as well as her reputation as a virtuous young woman. So their dates consisted entirely of long walks in the dark. There was nothing else to do anyway; by the time they started dating in earnest in the early 1990s, none of the restaurants or cinemas were operating because of the lack of power.
They would meet after dinner. The girl had instructed her boyfriend not to knock on the front door and risk questions from her older sisters, younger brother, or the nosy neighbors. They lived squeezed together in a long, narrow building behind which was a common outhouse shared by a dozen families. The houses were set off from the street by a white wall, just above eye level in height. The boy found a spot behind the wall where nobody would notice him as the light seeped out of the day. The clatter of the neighbors washing the dishes or using the toilet masked the sound of his footsteps. He would wait hours for her, maybe two or three. It didn't matter. The cadence of life is slower in North Korea. Nobody owned a watch.
The girl would emerge just as soon as she could extricate herself from the family. Stepping outside, she would peer into the darkness, unable to see him at first but sensing with certainty his presence. She wouldn't bother with makeup—no one needs it in the dark. Sometimes she just wore her school uniform: a royal blue skirt cut modestly below the knees, a white blouse and red bow tie, all of it made from a crinkly synthetic material. She was young enough not to fret about her appearance.
At first, they would walk in silence, then their voices would gradually rise to whispers and then to normal conversational levels as they left the village and relaxed into the night. They maintained an arm's-length distance from each other until they were sure they wouldn't be spotted.
Just outside the town, the road headed into a thicket of trees to the grounds of a hot-spring resort. It was once a resort of some renown; its 130-degree waters used to draw busloads of Chinese tourists in search of cures for arthritis and diabetes, but by now it rarely operated. The entrance featured a rectangular reflecting pond rimmed by a stone wall. The paths cutting through the grounds were lined with pine trees, Japanese maples, and the girl's favorites—the ginkgo trees that in autumn shed delicate mustard-yellow leaves in the shape of perfect Oriental fans. On the surrounding hills, the trees had been decimated by people foraging for firewood, but the trees at the hot springs were so beautiful that the locals respected them and left them alone.
Otherwise the grounds were poorly maintained. The trees were untrimmed, stone benches cracked, paving stones missing like rotten teeth. By the mid-1990s, nearly everything in North Korea was worn out, broken, malfunctioning. The country had seen better days. But the imperfections were not so glaring at night. The hot-springs pool, murky and choked with weeds, was luminous with the reflection of the sky above.
The night sky in North Korea is a sight to behold. It might be the most brilliant in Northeast Asia, the only place spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent. In the old days, North Korean factories contributed their share to the cloud cover, but no longer. No artificial lighting competes with the intensity of the stars etched into its sky.
The young couple would walk through the night, scattering ginkgo leaves in their wake. What did they talk about? Their families, their classmates, books they had read—whatever the topic, it was endlessly fascinating. Years later, when I asked the girl about the happiest memories of her life, she told me of those nights.
This is not the sort of thing that shows up in satellite photographs. Whether in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or in the East Asian studies department of a university, people usually analyze North Korea from afar. They don't stop to think that in the middle of this black hole, in this bleak, dark country where millions have died of starvation, there is also love.
by the time I met this girl, she was a woman, thirty-one years old. Mi-ran (as I will call her for the purposes of this book) had defected six years earlier and was living in South Korea. I had requested an interview with her for an article I was writing about North Korean defectors.
In 2004, I was posted in Seoul as bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. My job was to cover the entire Korean peninsula. South Korea was easy. It was the twelfth-largest economic power, a thriving if sometimes raucous democracy, with one of the most aggressive press corps in Asia. Government officials gave reporters their mobile telephone numbers and didn't mind being called at off-hours. North Korea was at the other extreme. North Korea's communications with the outside world were largely confined to tirades spat out by the Korean Central News Agency, nicknamed the "Great Vituperator" for its ridiculous bombast about the "imperialist Yankee bastards." The United States had fought on South Korea's behalf in the 1950–1953 Korean War, the first great conflagration of the Cold War, and still had forty thousand troops stationed there. For North Korea, it was as though the war had never ended, the animus was so raw and fresh.
U.S. citizens were only rarely admitted to North Korea and American journalists even less frequently. When I finally got a visa to visit Pyongyang in 2005, myself and a colleague were led along a well-worn path of monuments to the glorious leadership of Kim Jong-il and his late father, Kim Il-sung. At all times, we were chaperoned by two skinny men in dark suits, both named Mr. Park. (North Korea takes the precaution of assigning two "minders" to foreign visitors, one to watch the other so that they can't be bribed.) The minders spoke the same stilted rhetoric of the official news service. ("Thanks to our dear leader Kim Jong-il" was a phrase inserted with strange regularity into our conversations.) They rarely made eye contact when they spoke to us, and I wondered if they believed what they said. What were they really thinking? Did they love their leader as much as they claimed? Did they have enough food to eat? What did they do when they came home from work? What was it like to live in the world's most repressive regime?
If I wanted answers to my questions, it was clear I wasn't going to get them inside North Korea. I had to talk to people who had left— defectors.
In 2004, Mi-ran was living in Suwon, a city twenty miles south of Seoul, bright and chaotic. Suwon is home to Samsung Electronics and a cluster of manufacturing complexes producing objects most North Koreans would be stumped to identify—computer monitors, CD-ROMs, digital televisions, flash-memory sticks. (A statistic one often sees quoted is that the economic disparity between the Koreas is at least four times greater than that between East and West Germany at the time of German reunification in 1990.) The place is loud and cluttered, a cacophony of mismatched colors and sounds. As in most South Korean cities, the architecture is an amalgam of ugly concrete boxes topped with garish signage. High-rise apartments radiate for miles away from a congested downtown lined with Dunkin' Donuts and Pizza Huts and a host of Korean knockoffs. The backstreets are filled with love hotels with names like Eros Motel and Love-Inn Park that advertise rooms by the hour. The customary state of traffic is gridlock as thousands of Hyundais—more fruit of the economic miracle— try to plow their way between home and the malls. Because the city is in a perpetual state of gridlock, I took the train down from Seoul, a thirty-minute ride, then crawled along in a taxi to one of the few tranquil spots in town, a grilled beef-ribs restaurant across from an eighteenth-century fortress.
At first I didn't spot Mi-ran. She looked quite unlike the other North Koreans I had met. There were by that time some six thousand North Korean defectors living in South Korea and there were usually telltale signs of their difficulty in assimilating—skirts worn too short, labels still attached to new clothes—but Mi-ran was indistinguishable from a South Korean. She wore a chic brown sweater set and matching knit trousers. It gave me the impression (which like many others would prove wrong) that she was rather demure. Her hair was swept back and neatly held in place with a rhinestone barrette. Her impeccable appearance was marred only by a smattering of acne on her chin and a heaviness around the middle, the result of being three months pregnant. A year earlier she had married a South Korean, a civilian military employee, and they were expecting their first child.
I had asked Mi-ran to lunch in order to learn more about North Korea's school system. In the years before her defection, she had worked as a kindergarten teacher in a mining town. In South Korea she was working toward a graduate degree in education. It was a serious conversation, at times grim. The food on our table went uneaten as she described watching her five- and six-year-old pupils die of starvation. As her students were dying, she was supposed to teach them that they were blessed to be North Korean. Kim Il-sung, who ruled from the time the peninsula was severed at the end of World War II until his death in 1994, was to be revered as a god, and Kim Jong- il, his son and successor, as the son of a god, a Christ-like figure. Mi-ran had become a harsh critic of the North Korean system of brainwashing.
After an hour or two of such conversation, we veered into what might be disparaged as typical girl talk. There was something about Mi- ran's self-possession and her candor that allowed me to ask more personal questions. What did young North Koreans do for fun? Were there any happy moments in her life in North Korea? Did she have a boyfriend there?
"It's funny you ask," she said. "I had a dream about him the other night."
She described the boy as tall and limber with shaggy hair flopping over his forehead. After she got out of North Korea, she was delighted to discover that there was a South Korean teen idol by the name of Yu Jun-sang who looked quite like her ex-boyfriend. (As a result, I have used the pseudonym Jun-sang to identify him.) He was smart, too, a future scientist studying at one of the best universities in Pyongyang. That was one of the reasons they could not be seen in public. Their relationship could have damaged his career prospects.
There are no love hotels in North Korea. Casual intimacy between the sexes is discouraged. Still, I tried to pry gently about how far the relationship went. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition paperback.
Revue de presse
“The narrow boundaries of our knowledge have expanded radically with the publication of Los Angeles Times correspondent Barbara Demick’s Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. . . . Elegantly structured and written, Nothing To Envy is a groundbreaking work of literary nonfiction.”–Slate
“Excellent . . . lovely work of narrative nonfiction . . . a book that offers extensive evidence of the author’s deep knowledge of this country while keeping its sights firmly on individual stories and human details.”–New York Times
“A deeply moving book.”–Wall Street Journal
“Superbly reported account of life in North Korea.’’–Bloomberg
“There’s a simple way to determine how well a journalist has reported a story, internalized the details, seized control of the narrative and produced good work. When you read the result, you forget the journalist is there. Barbara Demick, the Los Angeles Times’ Beijing bureau chief, has aced that test in “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea,” a clear-eyed and deeply reported look at one of the world’s most dismal places.’’–Cleveland Plain Dealer
“The ring of authority as well as the suspense of a novel.’’–Washington Times
“Excellent new book is one of only a few that have made full use of the testimony of North Korean refugees and defectors. A delightful, easy-to-read work of literary nonfiction, it humanizes a downtrodden, long-suffering people whose individual lives, hopes and dreams are so little known abroad that North Koreans are often compared to robots. . . . The tale of the star-crossed lovers, Jun-sang and Mi-ran, is so charming as to have inspired reports that Hollywood might be interested.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“In a stunning work of investigation, Barbara Demick removes North Korea’s mask to reveal what lies beneath its media censorship and repressive dictatorship.”–Daily Beast
“In spite of the strict restrictions on foreign press, awardwinning journalist Demick caught telling glimpses of just how surreal and mournful life is in North Korea. . . . Strongly written and gracefully structured, Demick’s potent blend of personal narratives and piercing journalism vividly and evocatively portrays courageous individuals and a tyrannized state.”—Booklist
“These are the stories you’ll never hear from North Korea’s state news agency.”–New York Post
“At times a page-turner, at others an intimate study in totalitarian psychology. Demick . . . takes us inside the minds of her subjects, rendering them as complex, often compelling characters—not the brainwashed parodies we see marching in unison in TV reports.”–Philadelphia Inquirer
“The last time I read a book with something truly harrowing or pitiful or sad on every page it was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and those characters had the good fortune to not be real.”–St. Louis Magazine --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition paperback.
“Excellent . . . lovely work of narrative nonfiction . . . a book that offers extensive evidence of the author’s deep knowledge of this country while keeping its sights firmly on individual stories and human details.”–New York Times
“A deeply moving book.”–Wall Street Journal
“Superbly reported account of life in North Korea.’’–Bloomberg
“There’s a simple way to determine how well a journalist has reported a story, internalized the details, seized control of the narrative and produced good work. When you read the result, you forget the journalist is there. Barbara Demick, the Los Angeles Times’ Beijing bureau chief, has aced that test in “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea,” a clear-eyed and deeply reported look at one of the world’s most dismal places.’’–Cleveland Plain Dealer
“The ring of authority as well as the suspense of a novel.’’–Washington Times
“Excellent new book is one of only a few that have made full use of the testimony of North Korean refugees and defectors. A delightful, easy-to-read work of literary nonfiction, it humanizes a downtrodden, long-suffering people whose individual lives, hopes and dreams are so little known abroad that North Koreans are often compared to robots. . . . The tale of the star-crossed lovers, Jun-sang and Mi-ran, is so charming as to have inspired reports that Hollywood might be interested.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“In a stunning work of investigation, Barbara Demick removes North Korea’s mask to reveal what lies beneath its media censorship and repressive dictatorship.”–Daily Beast
“In spite of the strict restrictions on foreign press, awardwinning journalist Demick caught telling glimpses of just how surreal and mournful life is in North Korea. . . . Strongly written and gracefully structured, Demick’s potent blend of personal narratives and piercing journalism vividly and evocatively portrays courageous individuals and a tyrannized state.”—Booklist
“These are the stories you’ll never hear from North Korea’s state news agency.”–New York Post
“At times a page-turner, at others an intimate study in totalitarian psychology. Demick . . . takes us inside the minds of her subjects, rendering them as complex, often compelling characters—not the brainwashed parodies we see marching in unison in TV reports.”–Philadelphia Inquirer
“The last time I read a book with something truly harrowing or pitiful or sad on every page it was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and those characters had the good fortune to not be real.”–St. Louis Magazine --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition paperback.
Détails sur le produit
- ASIN : B003V4ASV8
- Éditeur : Granta Books (10 juin 2010)
- Langue : Anglais
- Taille du fichier : 3957 KB
- Synthèse vocale : Activée
- Lecteur d’écran : Pris en charge
- Confort de lecture : Activé
- X-Ray : Activé
- Word Wise : Activé
- Pense-bêtes : Sur Kindle Scribe
- Nombre de pages de l'édition imprimée : 338 pages
- Pagination - ISBN de l'édition imprimée de référence : 0385523904
- Classement des meilleures ventes d'Amazon : 136,335 en Boutique Kindle (Voir les 100 premiers en Boutique Kindle)
- 22 en Journalism Writing Reference
- 35 en 21st Century World History
- 101 en Asian History
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4,7 sur 5 étoiles
4,7 sur 5
3 788 évaluations
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5,0 sur 5 étoiles
Un livre magnifique, bouleversant, très bien écrit, très documenté, et profondément humaniste.
Commenté en France 🇫🇷 le 17 février 2022
Utile
Commenté en France 🇫🇷 le 17 décembre 2014
Au début on se doute de l'objectivité globale de l'auteur car quelques détails semblent être décrit d'une façon peu subjective, bien "à l'américaine". Cela se perd au cours des chapitres où l'on se retrouve au milieu de la vie des protagonistes. Absolument à recommander - hélas publié en anglais uniquement jusque là, mais après quelques pages, ça va.
Une personne a trouvé cela utile
Signaler un abus
Commenté en France 🇫🇷 le 7 février 2017
This book had been recommended to me by a friend and I have to do the same. It's an enthralling story and I was saddened to have reached the end of it. It's hard to believe that the events are all true.
Commenté en France 🇫🇷 le 24 décembre 2016
j'ai hésité à acheter ce livre... mais une fois reçu je suis plongé dans sa lecture qui vous emporte au gré des pages à l'histoire ordinaire des vies en Corée du Nord.... Un livre qui mériterait d'être traduit en français !!!
Commenté en France 🇫🇷 le 16 décembre 2013
Conseillé par un ami anglophone, j'ai sauté sur l'occasion d'acquérir ce livre. Il est si rare de pouvoir découvrir l'histoire des Nord-Coréens et quoi de mieux que des témoignages poignants de ceux qui ont eu la possibilité de s'enfuir de cette prison à ciel ouvert. Romancé par l'excellente Barbara Demick, je conseille cette merveille à tous ceux qui souhaitent en savoir plus sur ce pays surréaliste.
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Meilleurs commentaires provenant d’autres pays
Lindosland
5,0 sur 5 étoiles
Gripping, and enlightening, but some things don't add up. Read it, but with an open mind.
Commenté au Royaume-Uni 🇬🇧 le 25 mars 2018
'We are a shrimp among whales'. That is how Koreans have described themselves and for me it sums up the dilemma of Korea, a little country that existed for a thousand years and more in much the same way as China, but then became a pawn in other's games. Did you know that the dropping of those nuclear bombs on Japan freed Koreans from 25yrs of occupation by the Japanese? I didn't. As a boy I would hear about the 'Korean war', but it meant absolutely nothing to me. I was surprised to learn that 3M Koreans died as the US fought to make this little country an outpost of the West and stop it becoming communist like it's neighbours Russia and China before reaching a stalemate and dividing the country in two. How strange it is, and what an amazing experiment, that all our most prized electronic possessions - from flat screen TV's to laptops and mobiles - come from South Korea, made by people with the same history and genetic makeup as those in the North with such a different way of life!
I'm so glad I found this book. It's a gripping read. But it's important to remember that it's author bases it on the stories of defectors who 'escaped' from N Korea. We come to understand their backgrounds and their reasons, but not all Koreans want to escape (as the book also points out), and those who do are left with fond memories of their life in a place where the stars shine brightly in an unpolluted sky with no light pollution (no streetlights). Where, if you accept the system, there are a great many less things to worry about than we are used to. The defectors have their own grudges based on their individual backgrounds, but are they proof that the regime is all bad?
There's something wrong with the story we are given; some things that don't 'add up'. During the terrible famine of the 1990's it's shear lack of food that is the underlying problem. Then, when things start to pick up, we are given a heart-warming story of how everyone sets up as an entrepreneur, cooking biscuits, gathering firewood, cutting hair and so on, and it is the stirrings of small-scale capitalism that save the day. But cooking biscuits does nothing to increase the food value of the basic ingredients - no amount of work and cooperation can help people get out of a famine; the basic problem is simply lack of food. Some entrepreneurs start growing vegetables by creating terraced gardens, but how come they didn't do this sooner? We have been told that N Korea was not always struggling. In the early years after the country was divided it was N Korea that had the best standard of living, and S Korea struggled - until the explosion of the consumer electronics industry there. What actually caused N Korea's famine was not communism, or mismanagement, but a series of quite exceptional droughts and floods that damaged the crops; with little external aid. What rescued the situation was better weather and more foreign aid, especially perhaps from China as it found better times. It's a pity that the peoples resourcefulness could not be directed into simply growing food by whatever means during the bad years, and I would like to have heard what was going on in the official farms and workplaces. The biscuit baking brings relief through profit, but only because there were people to buy biscuits who had money, and because there were basic ingredients to be had if you had money to buy them. Who were these people, in this poor region of Chongjin? Who were the men with money to pay for prostitutes? We don't seem to be getting the full story! If they were simply the better off favoured classes who got better rations, then why was such trading not going on during the disaster? Are we being fed American propaganda regarding the wonderful power of capitalism to rescue people from famine?
I'm left with a very interesting puzzle that seems to incorporates all the politics, tactics, wars and history of the world - what do you do if you find yourself in charge of a country that is 'a shrimp among whales', with borders against Russia and China, and Japan just across the sea? You value your country and it's former ways, and understandably you hate the USA which killed so many of your people in order to create a Western outpost. You see the people of S Korea and the West with their own problems - overwork, stress, mental illness, drugs, pollution and so on, not to mention the breakdown of families that seems to be accelerating as children use Facebook and view pornography, while Facebook monitors the entire population, unchecked, to a degree never before known anywhere in the world! You see protests about the 'one percent' with all the wealth (N Korea, despite the injustices, is a much more equal society) Is there any way that you can preserve what you value while letting the people talk to, and be enticed by, that other, purely hedonistic, world. It's a hell of a problem, and it goes a lot deeper than just communism vs capitalism or dictatorship vs democracy. If there is a way, I think it rests with education - a proper understanding of the good and the bad in both systems along with a questioning of what human beings are, and what they really want (evolutionary psychology is now giving us many of the answers). In N Korea, education is valued, and free, while in the USA school kids now live in fear of their lives. We need to understand both sides, and this book is a great start. How ironic that it won the BBC Samuel Johnson prize, yet the BBC tells us practically nothing about N Korea, other than that it is a 'rogue state'! Now that I know the names of some places in that country, and their distinctive backgrounds, I'd love to see an honest documentary showing me the places and discussing the issues impartially. A sort of 'David Attenborough life on earth' but about humans! From what I know, Korea's leaders would like this too, but understandably, they're terrified.
I'm so glad I found this book. It's a gripping read. But it's important to remember that it's author bases it on the stories of defectors who 'escaped' from N Korea. We come to understand their backgrounds and their reasons, but not all Koreans want to escape (as the book also points out), and those who do are left with fond memories of their life in a place where the stars shine brightly in an unpolluted sky with no light pollution (no streetlights). Where, if you accept the system, there are a great many less things to worry about than we are used to. The defectors have their own grudges based on their individual backgrounds, but are they proof that the regime is all bad?
There's something wrong with the story we are given; some things that don't 'add up'. During the terrible famine of the 1990's it's shear lack of food that is the underlying problem. Then, when things start to pick up, we are given a heart-warming story of how everyone sets up as an entrepreneur, cooking biscuits, gathering firewood, cutting hair and so on, and it is the stirrings of small-scale capitalism that save the day. But cooking biscuits does nothing to increase the food value of the basic ingredients - no amount of work and cooperation can help people get out of a famine; the basic problem is simply lack of food. Some entrepreneurs start growing vegetables by creating terraced gardens, but how come they didn't do this sooner? We have been told that N Korea was not always struggling. In the early years after the country was divided it was N Korea that had the best standard of living, and S Korea struggled - until the explosion of the consumer electronics industry there. What actually caused N Korea's famine was not communism, or mismanagement, but a series of quite exceptional droughts and floods that damaged the crops; with little external aid. What rescued the situation was better weather and more foreign aid, especially perhaps from China as it found better times. It's a pity that the peoples resourcefulness could not be directed into simply growing food by whatever means during the bad years, and I would like to have heard what was going on in the official farms and workplaces. The biscuit baking brings relief through profit, but only because there were people to buy biscuits who had money, and because there were basic ingredients to be had if you had money to buy them. Who were these people, in this poor region of Chongjin? Who were the men with money to pay for prostitutes? We don't seem to be getting the full story! If they were simply the better off favoured classes who got better rations, then why was such trading not going on during the disaster? Are we being fed American propaganda regarding the wonderful power of capitalism to rescue people from famine?
I'm left with a very interesting puzzle that seems to incorporates all the politics, tactics, wars and history of the world - what do you do if you find yourself in charge of a country that is 'a shrimp among whales', with borders against Russia and China, and Japan just across the sea? You value your country and it's former ways, and understandably you hate the USA which killed so many of your people in order to create a Western outpost. You see the people of S Korea and the West with their own problems - overwork, stress, mental illness, drugs, pollution and so on, not to mention the breakdown of families that seems to be accelerating as children use Facebook and view pornography, while Facebook monitors the entire population, unchecked, to a degree never before known anywhere in the world! You see protests about the 'one percent' with all the wealth (N Korea, despite the injustices, is a much more equal society) Is there any way that you can preserve what you value while letting the people talk to, and be enticed by, that other, purely hedonistic, world. It's a hell of a problem, and it goes a lot deeper than just communism vs capitalism or dictatorship vs democracy. If there is a way, I think it rests with education - a proper understanding of the good and the bad in both systems along with a questioning of what human beings are, and what they really want (evolutionary psychology is now giving us many of the answers). In N Korea, education is valued, and free, while in the USA school kids now live in fear of their lives. We need to understand both sides, and this book is a great start. How ironic that it won the BBC Samuel Johnson prize, yet the BBC tells us practically nothing about N Korea, other than that it is a 'rogue state'! Now that I know the names of some places in that country, and their distinctive backgrounds, I'd love to see an honest documentary showing me the places and discussing the issues impartially. A sort of 'David Attenborough life on earth' but about humans! From what I know, Korea's leaders would like this too, but understandably, they're terrified.
Sara Paine
4,0 sur 5 étoiles
Real North Korean Life Stories - But Not An Easy Read
Commenté au Royaume-Uni 🇬🇧 le 24 février 2020
This book is not an easy read, but it is a fascinating insight into the lives of six North Korean defectors (unrelated, but all living in Chongjin) written by an American journalist Barbara Demick who has interviewed them and who kept in touch with them at regular intervals in South Korea to see how they’re getting on. The author has spoken to hundreds of North Koreans in the course of her career, but chose these particular individuals because she thought they would be more representative than people living in the capital Pyongyang.
The first two thirds of the book describes their lives in North Korea (DPRK) and the last third describes how they escaped and their new lives in the south. First hand reports about N Korea are extremely had to come by, and while newsreader Ri Chun-Hee has become something of a celebrity in the west for her impressive declamatory style – she actually says next to nothing. So hearing from real people who can speak freely for the first time in their lives is fascinating. The overwhelming feeling at the end is that North Koreans must be amazingly resilient, resourceful and adaptable to keep going, despite living, as they do, in such dire circumstances.
Life has always been hard in the North, but the famine of the 1990s killed at least one million people – around 4% of the population - and whole families were wiped out. An ill-advised policy of self-sufficiency (juche), propped up by energy supplies and chemical fertilisers from the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s with the demise of the USSR. leaving the DPRK isolated and frozen in time. In the chaos that followed, it was common for older generations to save their only food for their children who survived, but who were left parentless and with stunted growth. These young children are known as ‘wandering swallows’ (kotjebi) because they are constantly on the move looking for food and shelter.
Following the misery of the early chapters – people having to walk for hours into the countryside to forage for grass and tree bark to eat - you think that at last there is light at the end of the tunnel when they risk everything to escape, but unfortunately their lives in South Korea are not always ones of undiluted joy either.
Some adapt better than others, but they all find it hard to adjust to consumerist South Korean society in different ways. It’s overwhelming to be faced with so many choices when you are used to a government deciding everything for you. Some feel guilty about the family they have left behind, some of whom have been locked up in labour camps as a result of their relative’s defection, and some even feel a certain amount of nostalgia – they miss the sense of community that exists in the north because everyone was in the same boat – equally starved and poor. Some feel angry and defensive when their country is criticised by South Koreans, even though they hate the regime themselves. This is a difficult book to read, but an important one if you want to find out more about life in North Korea.
The title ‘Nothing To Envy’ comes from a song that North Korean children are taught to sing at school.
The first two thirds of the book describes their lives in North Korea (DPRK) and the last third describes how they escaped and their new lives in the south. First hand reports about N Korea are extremely had to come by, and while newsreader Ri Chun-Hee has become something of a celebrity in the west for her impressive declamatory style – she actually says next to nothing. So hearing from real people who can speak freely for the first time in their lives is fascinating. The overwhelming feeling at the end is that North Koreans must be amazingly resilient, resourceful and adaptable to keep going, despite living, as they do, in such dire circumstances.
Life has always been hard in the North, but the famine of the 1990s killed at least one million people – around 4% of the population - and whole families were wiped out. An ill-advised policy of self-sufficiency (juche), propped up by energy supplies and chemical fertilisers from the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s with the demise of the USSR. leaving the DPRK isolated and frozen in time. In the chaos that followed, it was common for older generations to save their only food for their children who survived, but who were left parentless and with stunted growth. These young children are known as ‘wandering swallows’ (kotjebi) because they are constantly on the move looking for food and shelter.
Following the misery of the early chapters – people having to walk for hours into the countryside to forage for grass and tree bark to eat - you think that at last there is light at the end of the tunnel when they risk everything to escape, but unfortunately their lives in South Korea are not always ones of undiluted joy either.
Some adapt better than others, but they all find it hard to adjust to consumerist South Korean society in different ways. It’s overwhelming to be faced with so many choices when you are used to a government deciding everything for you. Some feel guilty about the family they have left behind, some of whom have been locked up in labour camps as a result of their relative’s defection, and some even feel a certain amount of nostalgia – they miss the sense of community that exists in the north because everyone was in the same boat – equally starved and poor. Some feel angry and defensive when their country is criticised by South Koreans, even though they hate the regime themselves. This is a difficult book to read, but an important one if you want to find out more about life in North Korea.
The title ‘Nothing To Envy’ comes from a song that North Korean children are taught to sing at school.
Pauline Butcher Bird
4,0 sur 5 étoiles
Good way to learn North Korean 20th century history
Commenté au Royaume-Uni 🇬🇧 le 12 juin 2017
I am pleased I read this book which is neither fiction nor non-fiction but faction. We get interviews of several people who defected from North Korea to South Korea and the author fills in their back stories in a novelistic style. I learned that Korea was occupied by Japan for 35 years until the end of the Second World War when America and Russia, in their wisdom drew a line across the middle and separated North Korea from the South, a folly that was to lead to the Korean war. In 1948, Kim Il-Sung was imposed by Stalin as the supreme Communist leader of N. Korea and oversaw the invasion of the South. We learn how after the war ended, N. Korea's economy surpassed that of its southern rival but from the 1980s it all went sour, electricity was turned off, factories closed, and over time, in the provinces, people starved to death. We follow four characters through to their escape and defection to South Korea.
This is an easy way to get a foothold into North Korean history. I now want to read more about the impact of the Japanese occupation and more details about the cause of North Korea's subsequent economic decline.
Freak Out!: My Life With Frank Zappa
This is an easy way to get a foothold into North Korean history. I now want to read more about the impact of the Japanese occupation and more details about the cause of North Korea's subsequent economic decline.
Freak Out!: My Life With Frank Zappa
Bizzy
5,0 sur 5 étoiles
A Nation Kept in the Dark, Unaware of Modern Living.
Commenté au Royaume-Uni 🇬🇧 le 15 mars 2020
It is difficult to imagine a country where the people are so controlled that they are not allowed to cook with electricity, watch tv programmes made outside North Korea, banned from the only smart city due to deformity, disability, dwarfism or special needs.
Hell on earth? This is worse than anything I have heard about the hell mentioned in religious books.
The innocence and bravery of the people of North Vietnam are deeply moving. The author tells how people she interviewed managed to survive starvation, brutality, snobbery and the crushing of their hopes and dreams.
Communism for a fairer society? No! Communism is for the ruthless, greedy psychopathic slave masters to have a wonderful life at the heartbreaking expense of the poor.
Hell on earth? This is worse than anything I have heard about the hell mentioned in religious books.
The innocence and bravery of the people of North Vietnam are deeply moving. The author tells how people she interviewed managed to survive starvation, brutality, snobbery and the crushing of their hopes and dreams.
Communism for a fairer society? No! Communism is for the ruthless, greedy psychopathic slave masters to have a wonderful life at the heartbreaking expense of the poor.
James C.W
5,0 sur 5 étoiles
Gives you the big picture, and then the gritty reality behind it. Great nonfiction!
Commenté au Royaume-Uni 🇬🇧 le 20 octobre 2017
I picked up this book after Kim Jong-il's death brought North Korea to my interest. N. Korea was always on my peripheral as an oddity of a country, but I didn't know much more than that, which is what led to me buying this book. I did the usual of reading about online through various sites however wanted to sink my teeth in to the people of North Korea and this book did just that.
It was gripping and I steamed through it in lightning fashion however that's not to say it was an easy read. It gives you the knowledge you have, the big picture, and then will give you the harsher reality of that picture - breaking the already bleak illusion.
A brilliant nonfiction which should be added to anybody's list looking to try and understand North Korea and the people living there.
It was gripping and I steamed through it in lightning fashion however that's not to say it was an easy read. It gives you the knowledge you have, the big picture, and then will give you the harsher reality of that picture - breaking the already bleak illusion.
A brilliant nonfiction which should be added to anybody's list looking to try and understand North Korea and the people living there.
