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The Sorcerer of Pyongyang

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An enormous horned red giant was holding a naked woman in one hand and a massive sword in the other.

The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by Marcel Theroux | Hachette UK The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by Marcel Theroux | Hachette UK

The political messages might have been ham-fisted, but the stories were engaging and the illustrations lively. As he fixed the pale-green seedlings in the mud, Jun-su would let his thoughts wander to the game he had played with Teacher Kang. This intriguing new work from Theroux plunges readers into a dystopian North Korea and extracts the emotional complexity of a single life intended to be lived as a secondary character within its state ideology. Over the subsequent week and a half, the delegation was shown around model farms, a granite quarry, a sewing-machine factory, a youth center containing many preternaturally talented child performers, the Pyongyang Children’s Foodstuffs Factory, and Kim Il-sung University.In 1995, an 11-year-old boy in North Korea, Cho Jun-su, stumbles across a strange, foreign book that will change his life. He explained that the House of Possibility was usually played with dice, but that he had adapted the rules so they could play with yut sticks instead. However, in an act of forgetfulness that was to have enormous repercussions, Fidel left one of his belongings in the room at the Songdowon Hotel in Wonsan that he had shared with his father. Entertaining as The Sorcerer of Pyongyang is, the book elides greater insights into the North Korean refugee experience in favor of a fast, fairy-tale ending that fails to explain the narrator’s specific interest or relationship to Jun-su’s remarkable journey or drive home its thematic significance. One Sunday afternoon towards the end of September 1991, a heavyset forty-seven-year-old man with thick glasses and unruly dark hair took his seat on an Ilyushin jet painted in the handsome red and white livery of the North Korean state airline, Choson Minhang.

The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by All Book Marks reviews for The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by

Jun-Su is a ten-year-old North Korean boy who discovers a copy of The Dungeon Master's Guide, left behind by a foreign guest, in the hotel where his father works. Opening the book, Jun-su stared uncomprehendingly at the name of Fidel Olatunji-Kapsberger inscribed on the flyleaf in both an elaborate cursive script and Elvish runes. Undoubtedly, he would have carefully removed any references to the Dear Leader, so as not to desecrate his name or image with hot fat. They were forced to endure immense privation before they were finally able to escape and bring the good news of their discovery to the grateful inhabitants of earth. There was also a random "I" character that I couldn't figure out where they really fit in the book( side note read someone elses review and they said it was the author inserting himself in the book) .And on February 16, the nation celebrated the Day of the Shining Star, the birthday of the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il.

The Sorcerer of Pyongyang | Marcel Theroux | London Review The Sorcerer of Pyongyang | Marcel Theroux | London Review

He moved jerkily across to the bedding cupboard and slid the mysterious book out of its hiding place.But before you get to it, the door swings open with a bang and out jumps a terrifying skeleton waving a sword. This is how it turned out that, sometime during the summer of 1995, Cho So-dok’s eleven-year-old son, Cho Jun-su, stumbled across the book while he was fetching a mattress for a visiting relative. The journey took twelve hours and required a change of trains and a long walk from the station at the other end. Inspired by the testimony of North Korean refugees and drawing on the author's personal experience of North Korea, it explores the power of empathy and imagination in a society where they are dangerous liabilities.

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