kim on korea
Suki Kim, author of The Interpreter, in bookstores now, writes movingly about what it was like to visit North Korea. There’s everything you might expect (famine, persecution, cult of personality) and everything you might not (people who fled North Korea in horror decades ago, now calling it “home.”)
If anyone’s read Kim’s book already, I’d love to hear your thoughts. I remember picking it up and reading the first couple of pages and then putting it back down–it didn’t grab my interest.
Link via Arts and Letters Daily.
February 4th, 2003 at 7:35 pm
something vaguely dissonant about the first couple chapters (I didn’t get very far either). the book has all the markings of a first effort: unsteady narrative voice, awkward style, thin characters, and also too much whining! I think she could have the ‘it’ factor, that separates hobbiest fiction writing from professional. She’s not quite there yet but it might happen three or four books down the pipe.