The secretive land of North Korea has always been in the news for all the wrong reasons: human rights abuses, nucleur tests, public executions, and an authoritarian government, among others. Given how difficult it is to enter this little-known country, books on it too are few but varied. Some speak of a repressive state; some are first-hand accounts by travellers; some by North Koreans who have fled and found refuge in other countries, only to recount past horrors; and a few on how North Korea is a lot more than what we hear.
Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea (2004) is a black-and-white graphic novel that focusses mostly on the landmarks in North Korea’s capital. To capture the colourless world that he stayed in for two months, Delisle’s sketches are in pencil. He draws only what he is allowed to see, but the book captures in picture the story of a foreigner with little freedom to travel.
If Delisle’s book is from a foreigner’s eyes, journalist Blaine Harden’s Escape from Camp 14 (2012) is an insider’s account of an authoritarian regime. This heart-rending, brutal account followed Harden’s profile of Shin Dong-hyuk, the subject of the book, for The Washington Post . Shin, who is born in a North Korean labour camp, speaks of the torture he endures, the executions he is witness to, including of his mother and brother, and his final escape to the U.S. A book filled with ghastly details, Escape is as morbidly gripping as it is controversial.
A rare attempt to show North Korea empathetically, as any other country, was made by British diplomat John Everard in Only Beautiful, Please: A British Diplomat in North Korea (2012) . Everard speaks of a civilisation that has suffered under the greatest information blackout that began in the 20th century and that continues until today. He changes the names of those he interviews, but writes that North Korea deals with the usual urban and rural issues that many developing countries deal with, including the extreme cold in Pyongyang and changing government plans. Everard says he feared that he was moving around in a huge surveillance state, but found people often laughing away his fears. He speaks of things as mundane as restaurants that serve few but delicious dishes, to show how life is as normal as yours or mine.
Anjaly Thomas, in There are no Gods in North Korea (2016) , writes a easy-to-read account of her journey through a controlling nation where restrictions galore are imposed on tourists.
