Nothing to Envy

"In her book, Demick interviewed several North Koreans who are now living in South Korea, and then told their stories so that we can really understand their experiences both inside North Korea and afterwards, once they had escaped. She includes great details that show everyday life in North Korea, including descriptions of a couple who have a secret relationship, as well as a doctor and an elementary-school teacher. They all live in Chongjin, which is North Korea’s third largest city, so it’s an area that people might not be so familiar with. There are still people living in Pyongyang who are very poor, because it’s the capital and black markets, or what we call ‘private markets’ are forbidden there. In other provinces people have more freedom, and there are many other cities. The rich one percent who live in Pyongyang are completely atypical of the rest of the population. They are so different – afforded so many other privileges – it would almost be impossible to outline the distinctions here there are so many. But they have so much more luxury, relatively. When I first visited my uncle’s house in Pyongyang, I was really shocked. I thought my family was rich, but Pyongyang was on an entirely different level. That was the first time I knew there could be a different kind of life."

"This is probably my favourite work of narrative nonfiction ever. It’s such an amazing book. She’s written about life in North Korea , which is one of the most difficult to access, closed regimes in the world, and she’s done it through very, very detailed interviews with North Korean defectors, mainly in South Korea, where she was based at the time, working as a foreign correspondent. It’s so compelling. It reads like a novel, a real page turner. You see the experience of life under a dictatorship so vividly. It goes through all sorts of major events—a famine, and so on. You get a powerful view of the complete brainwashing that takes place under such an extreme regime. “This is probably my favourite work of narrative nonfiction ever” It’s all the more interesting, I think, because she’s managed to reconstruct this having not been to many of the places she’s writing about. There’s actually a part at the end where, having seen these characters in North Korea and followed them through this time, you get to see behind the screen. She talks about her encounters with them in South Korea, and the ways they’ve changed but also the ways the scars of their experiences have stayed with them. It’s a huge, amazing feat of reporting. Plus it’s just so well written. So vivid. She is open about the challenges, and says in her author’s note that she visited North Korea several times – but of course she was limited by the country’s intense travel restrictions, and only went to Pyongyang and the demilitarised zone and the areas surrounding those. For the places she couldn’t get to, she sourced video footage and photographs from archives and taken by defectors. As well as this, she talks about her process of cross-referencing accounts, and verifying her subjects’ stories by interviewing other people who knew them, or by checking against documentation and historical accounts that are already out there. She’s a well-respected journalist, and it’s rigorous; she interviewed hundreds of people and didn’t include the claims she couldn’t verify in some way. You get these brief moments in the book that relate to her reporting, but the vast majority is an immersive third person account of her characters’ lives. It’s really impressive. She also points out that all the people she’s spoken to have defected at some point. That affects the story too—they’re a particular type of person. In that final section that I mentioned, when she goes behind the curtain, she talks a little about how many of the people she spoke to are quite tricky in one way or another."