Ten Years in the Tub (112 page)

Authors: Nick Hornby

BOOK: Ten Years in the Tub

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Barbara Demick has pieced together a picture of daily life in this poor benighted country from the testimonies of people who got out. They weren't dissidents, because dissidence doesn't really exist in North Korea. How can it, when its citizens have never been presented with an alternative way of thinking, and when they have no access to books, magazines, newspapers, movies, TV, music, or ideas from any other part of the world? Even conversation is dangerous, when you have no way of knowing whether your friends, neighbors, even children are informants. You don't have a telephone, and you can't write to anyone when you have no pen or paper, and even if you do, the postman may
well burn your letters simply because there's nothing else to burn. Meanwhile, everyone is starving to death. (Much of the book is about life in the 1990s, but, as Demick's epilogue and the most cursory Google search makes clear, nothing much has changed.) One of Demick's interviewees was a kindergarten teacher who saw her class go from fifty to fifteen kids. There is literally nothing to eat; they're peeling the bark off trees and boiling it up for soup. This is a country whose inhabitants have literally shrunk, while the rest of the world has got taller: the average North Korean seventeen-year-old boy is five inches smaller than his counterpart in the South.

A review quoted on my paperback edition tells us that this book is “required reading for anyone interested in the Korean peninsula”; I've just spent a few hundred words telling you how harrowing much of it is. We're not selling it to you, I can tell. And yet
Nothing to Envy
does have resonance, and it does transcend its subject matter, if that's what you want it to do. Both
Whoops!
and
Nothing to Envy
make it clear just how utterly dependent we all are on systems; without them, our much-cherished quirky individuality and our sense of moral self mean nothing. And I know this sounds weird and possibly callous, but Demick's book was every bit as absorbing as
Ball of Fire:
both contain a multitude of extraordinary stories, stories you want to remember. In other words, there is a kind of pleasure to be gained from the pain of others. That's the trouble with good writers. Only the bad ones make you want to do the human thing and look away.

I have almost no room to talk about
Sum
or
Huckleberry Finn
. Briefly:
Sum
I enjoyed, although I wish it had come with instructions. Was I supposed to read all the forty essays in one lump, which is what I did? Or was I supposed to pepper my month with them, treat myself to a tiny contemplation of what the afterlife is or does or should be at odd moments of the day and night? I suspect the latter. I blew it. As for
Huckleberry Finn
, the most important novel in American literature: Meh. That Tom Sawyer is a pill, isn't he?