Female Nomad and Friends (Tales of Breaking Free and Breaking Bread Around the World)by Rita Golden Gelman

Category: Travel - Essays & Travelogues
Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
ISBN: 978-0-307-58801-2 (0-307-58801-7)

Pub Date: June 1, 2010
Price: $17.50

Six years ago I read a book, "Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World" by Rita Golden Gelman  which finally answered the question I had been asking myself ever since I can remember, "What do I want to be when I grow up?".  Needless to say it is a book that actually changed my life.  Funnily enough, when I was in the moment of reading it I didn't realize the power that this book was going to have over me, infact, I thought quite the contrary. I remember balking at the idea of traveling with no set plans which is what Rita does all the time.  She takes advantage of opportunities as they come up, "It's my new credo: say yes to everything."  My rational mind was trying to tell me that people don't just up and leave for a foreign land (long term) without knowing anyone there or without a job in hand....I found it impetuous and foolhardy but I also found myself envying her nomadic lifestyle.
 

What a blessing to have the freedom to decide where you want to go and when and to trust enough that the locals of your "for-the-moment" chosen country will look out for you.  Rita never ever stays in hotels....she always stays with a local family found for her  through organizations like Servas and Couchsurfing, and that makes for a  complete and gratifying immersion in the local culture.  It took me a few years to realize that his is exactly what I see myself doing after my kids have left home. I am going to travel the world, living anywhere I want and for as long as I want in my quest to become a citizen of the world and to connect with people from all over the globe..   How will I fund myself?  Gelman did it by writing children's books...I'll have to find another way, but I have no doubt it can be done!

Anyway, I digress.  I am here to talk about Gelman's new book an anthology titled,"Female Nomad and Friends".  Here Gelman brings together 41 authors to tell their stories of adventuring around the world  and the bonds they created while doing so.  100% of royalties will be donated to fund scholarships to vocational schools for kids from the slums of New Delhi.   As if that isn't an incentive enough to pick up the book but the stories are something else too - captivating, inspirational, joyful, thoughtful and life-affirming - and, AND, the book includes 30 fabulous recipes! 

To celebrate the anthology and the special bonding that happens when people share a meal and a book, Rita is hosting a 24-hour global dinner, Connecting through Food, on Friday, June 18th. To learn more about how you can be a part of the 24-hour dinner, go to www.facebook.com/femalenomad. Rita will be posting some recipes, suggesting others, and also proposing topics for discussion.  I hope to be hosting one too!

The anthology holds a collection of some fifty-nine tales and while it may sound daunting I should let you know that most of the tales are just 2-3 pages long.  While I commend them all, I did have my favorites:  The one from Vietnam, "A Wet Shoe Story" by Carolyn Stoucy actually made me tear up and realize that humility is such an important quality, especially as I find that it seems to be the very thing many of us try to shrug off.  We are told never to "sell ourselves short", never to "be vulnerable", what that has done has turned us into a nation of people who don't know how to help or even to ask for it.  We can be a little selfish and individualistic.  In the East, it can be a little different...guests are revered and the well being of the community is certainly more important than the well being of the individual.

I also enjoyed the story from Samoa, "In Search Of A Familiar Soul", by Catherine Buchanan, not just because it was a passionate love story but also because it is a lesson in creative visualization.  What you envision, you really do draw to you.  You will find this story on page 186.   I thought there would be more from India but as far I can tell there is just one, but it is very well written and the author, Kelly Hayes-Raitt has done a great job of describing how India made her feel.  Then there is Rita's story of how she came to attend the making of "Ho Mok" a Thai Fish Custard dish in Ban Krud, Thailand.  I took particular interest in  this story because I have a sneaking suspicion that Fish Amok which is a Cambodian dish and one of my favorite dishes ever is really a version of  Ho Mok.  If I do host that Global Supper, I will be making this! 

Another story that touched me a whole lot is "Cajeta and the Spirits" by Maria Altobelli.  Here we meet Mercedes, a terminally ill old lady who "just couldn't make up her mind to cross over".  This touched me because I have a friend who works in a hospice and she said this is a common problem with some people close to death.  It's as if they are waiting for one last thing to happen before they give themselves permission to die.  In Mercedes' case, she passed peacefully after her son Arturo put a spoonful of "cajeta", a creamy, sweet, caramel confection made from cooked goat's milk inside his mother's lips.  Then Altobelli goes on to share a recipe for Cajeta which I will have to try.

No doubt, like me, you will have your own favourite stories and I would love it if you would share them here. Also, find one of those global suppers to participate in, it's all for a good cause.

Chef by Jaspreet Singh

Category: Fiction
Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 978-0-307-39933-5 (0-307-39933-8)

Pub Date: March 30, 2010
Price: $19.95

I have a confession to make: I picked this book purely because I loved the title and it's mesmerizingly-lovely cover, so, when it was  Shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Prize for Best Book and nominated for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, I couldn't have been happier!  Sadly, I had far too many interruptions while reading this book and that has affected my ability to write an insightful review, so forgive me if I just leave you with the synopsis and a review by Mary Whipple.  If anyone of you have read the book and have a review to share, please do so in the comments.


In a nutshell:  I liked the book.  It's a tiny book with big themes, with dreamlike-lyrical writing in some places and hard-hitting realistic descriptions in others.  Because two of the main protagonists are cooks, there is a lot of talk of food.  I particularly enjoyed reading Chef Kishen's food preparation instructions to our protagonist:

"Before cutting a tomato, give it the reference it deserves and ask:  Tomato, what would you like to become? Do you want to be alone?  Or do you prefer company? Apricot, what would you like to become? Would you like to become more than yourself in the company of saffron?  Saffron, who are you?"  

"Fish, what would you like to become? Basil, where did you lose your heart?  Lemon:  It is not who you touch but how you touch.  Learn from big elaichi. There, there.  Karayla, meri jaan, why are you so prudish? "

I have never thought to have a conversation with food before but maybe I should try it.  Don't they say that talking to plants makes them healthier?  :)

Best of all the novel includes a recipe for a tomato/olive and feta cheese salad that I actually made (was very popular with my two girls!)  There is also a recipe for the famous Kashmiri Rogan Josh on page 226 which I am going to try next.


Here is the Synopsis as promised:


Kirpal Singh is travelling on the slow train to Kashmir. As India passes by the window in a stream of tiny lights, glistening fields and huddled, noisy towns, he reflects on his destination, which is also his past: a military camp to which he has not returned for fourteen years...

Kirpal, Kip to his friends, is timorous and barely twenty when he arrives for the first time at General Kumar’s camp, nestled in the shadow of the mighty Siachen Glacier that claimed his father’s life. He is placed under the supervision of Chef Kishen, a fiery, anarchic mentor with long earlobes and a caustic tongue, who guides Kip towards the heady spheres of food and women. ‘The smell of a woman is a thousand times better than cooking the most sumptuous dinner, kid,’ he muses, over an evening beer. Kip is embarrassed – he has never slept with a woman, though a loose-limbed nurse in the local hospital has caught his eye.

In Srinagar, Kashmir, a contradictory place of erratic violence, extremes of temperature and high-altitude privilege, Kip learns to prepare indulgent Kashmiri dishes such as Mughlai mutton and slow-cooked Nahari, as well as delicacies from Florence, Madrid, Athens and Tokyo. Months pass and, though he is Sikh, Kip feels secure in his allegiance to India, the right side of this interminable conflict. Then, one muggy day, a Pakistani ‘terrorist’ with long, flowing hair is swept up on the banks of the river, and changes everything.

Mesmeric, mournful and intensely lyrical, Chef is a brave and compassionate debut about hope, love and memory, set against the devastatingly beautiful, war-scarred backdrop of occupied Kashmir. 

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives by Lola Shoneyin

A couple of years ago I remember going to the TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) for my first ever Nigerian movie.  The movie was titled "Abeni" and I remember being totally regaled by the spectacle: the colour, the melodrama and the sheer number of people cast in the movie!  Nigerian films are very joyous things indeed....with a LOT of dialogue from which you get a sense that the Nigerian people are a very vocal lot...also, they are sentimental with a flair for drama and exaggeration and a healthy belief in superstitions...it is these traits which always make for very fun movies and/or books based in that wonderful country.

Anyhow, I digress, the only reason I brought up "Abeni" is because when I picked up Lola Shoneyin's book, "The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives" its big patriarchal family with the head of the household who thinks he's the big gun but whose strings are being subtly pulled by the wives ( yes,"wives", because Baba Segi, our protagonist, is a polygamist with four wives) and the entertaining theatrics of this family of 12 members immediately transported me to the excitement and drama of Nollywood.

Let me introduce you to the wives:

Iya Segi is the first wife or the Queen of Wives.  Even though she is as round as a watermelon and probably on the bad side of forty, she is wily enough to command Baba Segi's mind, if not his heart. She is the one that disperses the rations in the household and keeps all the other competing wives under control.  Iya Segi is an excellent businesswoman and loves the feel, look  and scent of money.

Iya Tope, the second wife, is meek in comparison and unable, or maybe unwilling, to take charge of anything.  She is more than happy for Iya Segi to call the shots. She is happiest at home braiding her daughters' hair or watching television. She is totally non-confrontational which makes her stick out like a sore thumb amongst this chorus of characters who seem very able to get what they want. Unfortunately this habit of not wanting to confront anything or anyone makes her unwilling to stand up for injustices in the household.

Iya Femi  is the wife I liked the least, but probably the most interesting of them all. Born a Muslim she converts to Christianity and when she arrives at Baba Segi's house she has a belly of fire and brimstone. She is the kind of person who (probably because of her miserable childhood) is happiest when plotting revenge on people. She's the kind of person who suffers from schadenfreude - happiest when someone else is miserable.

And then there is Bolanle.  It is not just her education (the other wives are uneducated) that makes Bolanle different, but it is also the fact that of all the wives, Bolonle was the only one that Baba Segi deliberately chose to marry.  The other wives were either gifted to him or they gifted themselves.  She was also the youngest and the least competitive of the lot.  You would have thought that  these characteristics would make her Baba Segi's favorite wife, but it transpires that she is barren and since children is all that Baba Segi cares about he turns against her...not for long though for there is a secret waiting to be unearthed which turns the entire household on its head....

"The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives" is a treat to read with a plot and storyline that will
 alternately horrify, amuse, and bemuse its readers. But at the same time, its breezy tale urges a degree of compassion for the women of Nigeria as it is plain to see that even with economic opportunities on the rise women there are not always fully appreciated in that male-dominated society.

The novel is also is a startling but beautiful evocation of a Nigerian woman's inner world: of the little village girl whoso wanted to be literate; of the young woman filled with yearning to be loved by a young and handsome man and of the wife who comes to harbor a dangerous secret. But it is also a heartbreaking portrait of  the institution of marriage in Nigeria, especially the polygamous kind and the role women play as wives and co-wives. It also put under the magnifying glass this "obligation" to produce an heir, especially a male heir. A woman can be uneducated or ugly as sin and she will find a husband but if she's barren she may as well be a statue for no one has any need of her.

Lola Shoneyin is not just a writer to watch - she's a writer to follow.  You'll be saying the same thing once you read this fine novel.

If You Follow Me by Malena Watrous

Harper Perennial; 354 pages; $14.99 paperback

This is not a review, just a write-up:

I had never heard of Malena Watrous' "If you Follow Me" when it came to me by mail from Harpers Perennial, but its opening pages which contained a very sweet letter addressed to Malena Watrous by her Japanese minder in his charming Japlish seduced me and I knew I wanted to read more.

"Dear Miss Marina how are you? I'm fine thank you. A reason for this letter is: recently you attempt to throw away battery and jar and some kind of mushroom spaghetti and so forth, all together in one bin. Please don't try "it wasn't me." We Japanese seldom eat Gorgonzola cheese!"

I searched the net for reviews (something I don't usually do before I read a book) and fund them uniformly positive so  decided to give it a whirl and before I knew it I had breezed through 150 pages in a single sitting (almost unheard of for me these days!).

Here's a tiny synopsis so you get a feel for what the book's about:

Hoping to outpace her grief in the wake of her father's suicide, Marina has come to the small, rural Japanese town of Shika to teach English for a year. But in Japan, as she soon discovers, you can never really throw away your past . . . or anything else, for that matter.

"If You Follow Me" is at once a fish-out-of-water tale, a dark comedy of manners, and a strange kind of love story. Alive with vibrant and unforgettable characters--from an ambitious town matchmaker to a high school student-cum-rap artist wannabe with an addiction to self-tanning lotion--it guides readers over cultural bridges even as it celebrates the awkward, unlikely triumph of the human spirit.

The book is everything the publishers say it is and more.  It is semi-autobiographical, a love story, and a story about loss and learning to cope, but it also reads as an expat journal detailing interesting and obscure details about Japan and the Japanese that only someone living there would pick up on.  For instance, the Japanese fascination with rules.  You get the feeling that Japan is a very law-abiding country and they have little or no patience with foreigners who will not follow rules.  It took several epistolary rebukes from Marena's fellow “sensei,” or teacher, Hiroshi, who has been assigned to supervise her presence in Shika, about the "gomi rules" (garbage rules) before she caught on and started following .


What did I like about the book?  The honesty.  I felt like Watrous never tried to cover up her faux-pas or faults.  She was the tall, bumbling foreigner in Japan, who could only speak a smattering of Japanese, and she never tried to be anything else.  She has also has a wacky and dry sense of humor and is game to poke fun at herself as she  stumbles through life in Japan, but it's not a "laugh-a-minute" thing like we are used to seeing with travel writers like Bill Bryson, J. Proost.   Also, she really does want to teach the kids English but her progress is marred by the fact that she doesn't always "get" the culture, or what is or isn't acceptable in Japanese society.  Also, there is a kid (a previous hikikomori or a shut-in) who seems intent on sabotaging her time in Japan, not to mention the boys she teaches in the technical college who, because they don't see their futures improving with English, refuse to cooperate during the lessons.  They sit half-naked in class and their previous teacher left on account of sexual harassment. This brings up quite an interesting point actually....while Japan may be a country of social conformity, there are the exceptions or rebels who truly stick out like sore thumbs.

Also, while all of this is going on, Watrous is trying to cope with personal losses on two fronts:  the suicide of her father and the break up of her relationship with Carolyn, the girl she followed to Japan.   However, the book is not without its warm and funny moments like the gatherings at the "Hottorondo" or hot springs where colleagues gather and chat naked around the hot tubs.  I have heard this is similar in Finland that has a sauna culture, but as a Indo-westerner,  I am not sure I could frolic around naked with my colleagues and then work with them the next day!

Then there is the Japanese wedding she goes to:  unlike most weddings which are noisy, joyous occasions, Japanese weddings are sober and reflective in comparison.  Malena is given a long oral list of rules to follow while she is at the wedding, but, ofcourse, not belonging to the culture she finds it impossible to follow the rules and just has fun instead!

She also touches on a lot of issues currently affecting Japanese society....like the high rate of abortions, the shut-ins and issues that are peculiar to Shika only.  Shika being a small town ......... the city is constantly losing its young people to bigger cities for work, also, Shika is the site of two nuclear power plants

This book has been reviewed by many bloggers before me and I give you some links (below).  As you will see, some have loved the book and others haven't.  Read it and decide for yourself.  I would say it would be an immensely helpful read for anyone interested in learning about Japan and especially for someone who would like to go teach there.

Malena’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS

Tuesday, March 9th: Dolce Bellezza
Wednesday, March 10th: Take Me Away (and interview)
Thursday, March 11th: Life in the Thumb
Monday, March 15th: Raging Bibliomania
Wednesday, March 17th: Stephanie’s Written Word
Thursday, March 18th: nomadreader
Monday, March 22nd: Books and Movies
Wednesday, March 24th: Book Chatter
Tuesday, March 30th: BookNAround
Wednesday, March 31st: Bookstack

Secret Son by Laila Lalami

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Viking; Export Edition edition (4 Feb 2010)

I will be the first to admit that Laila Lalami's "Secret Son" had me yawning when I first opened it.  At chapter two I was wondering if I had made a mistake buying the book.  No, it wasn't slow-paced, quite the contrary infact, but coming to it after a novel like "Possessed" (my previous post) , the writing seemed so pedestrian and lifeless with tired metaphors (perhaps this is because French speaking Lalami writes in English?). Thankfully, by the time I was at chapter four things had started looking up and I found myself being drawn into the story.  I'm really glad I persisted because the book, although not a great literary triumph or anything, does bring its own rewards.

The title gives the plot away.  The story follows Youssef El Mekki,  a boy born out of wedlock to a servant girl and an already-married, very wealthy man (Nabil Amrani).  Being married Nabil was unable to give the woman and their son a home.  So Youssef grows up as the son of a single mother,  in Hay An Najat, a slum in Casablanca, often described as "melting pot of misery and poverty", while his "other" family, only a few miles away, live lives of the rich and famous. Had Youssef grown up in the US he may not has cursed his fate so much, but to be the bastard child of a single mother in Morocco carries with it a strong social stigma, something that is very hard to shrug off.

As a premise, the notion of there being a "secret son" is always exciting, but I think this particular novel failed to really capitalize on that - for a truly exciting and endearing story on a secret son try Tim Brannigan's "Where are you  Really From?".  However, as I continued to read I realized that the plot is little more than a hook from which to suspend a  relevant social and political commentary of  the Morocco of the new millennium and despite my reservations on the plot, narrative etc, I found myself drawn to the country, its people and their lives.

Morocco has a rigid hierarchy based on class, wealth, power and jobs, but especially class.  This division of society is very apparent in the cliques at Youssef's university.   There are the rich kids (the “Mercedes-and-Marlboro group”) as they are called; the religious kind (“headscarf -and-beard faction”); the egalitarians or ( “Marx-and-Lenin group”), and the "Berber Student Alliance and the Saharawis", students from distinct ethnic minorities within the country.

The novel also explores how Islamic fundamentalism has come to visit Morocco and how marginalized youth in the poorer areas of  the country are sitting ducks for fundamentalist recruiters.  A boy like Youssef who is not only poor but has major identity issues as well, would be just the kind of person these fundamentalists are fond of targeting.

All in all  "Secret Son" is a pitch-perfect rendering of  contemporary Moroccan life in all its chaos, energy, humor and terror.   As you read you will start to put the touristy, picture postcard images of Casablanca aside and come to the sad realization that it has problems with corruption, a mistrust of government/police, poverty, overcrowding, unequal distribution of wealth and fundamentalism, just to name a few.

Although I didn't like "Secret Son" as much as I enjoyed her previous novel "Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits", I will say that this novel has a great sense of place and just for that I will give it three stars out of five.

 

The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Original edition (February 16, 2010)

A comedic academician sounds almost oxymoronic, right?  But that is exactly how critic and Stanford University instructor  Elif Batuman comes across in her excellent first novel "The Possessed".  I had read a few blurbs before picking up the book and while I expected it to be touching on humorous I was not prepared for just how laugh-out-loud funny some parts of the book are and how Elif's pen can turn any meeting-of-people into a scene from "Whose Life is it Anyway" (a live improv comedy show where a bunch of comedians improvise everyday situations turning them into comically bizarre events!)

 Batuman’s “fascination with Russianness” began after she discovered an old copy of "Anna Karenina" as a teenager at her grandmother’s apartment in Ankara.   Funnily enough, I, too, have Anna Karenina to thank for my love of Russian literature. In my case, I discovered a copy of Anna Karenina while I waited for my mother in the waiting room of the Russian Embassy in Bombay. I managed to read a few chapters while I waited and was completely bewitched. I suspect Bautman fell under the same spell.

 This novel ( The Possessed)  thus sets out to explore her love and fascination with Russian literature where she not only offers a fresh perspective on well-loved Russian authors and their works (Babel, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky to name a few), but takes the reader on trips to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retraces Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus; learns why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying and also observes an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva.

How does a student like her get to travel so much?  Batuman believes in grants. In a chapter titled “Who Killed Leo Tolstoy?” she requires grant money to help pay for a trip to a conference at Tolstoy’s estate. To qualify for an extra $1,500, she devises a theory that Tolstoy was murdered. Her academic department doesn’t buy it, but she makes the trip nevertheless.

I don't suppose this is meant to be a travelogue but Batuman with her keen eye for beautiful detail, her penchant for absurd stories and her knowledge of Russian and Uzbek (which gives her access to the locals)makes for an invaluable raconteur of travel stories.  She is an  endearing guide and after you read about her travels in Samarkhand, Tashkent and St. Petersburg, you'll find yourself "possessed" with a desire to travel there yourselves.

Batuman has this penchant for picking up the oddest, most fascinating details.  For instance, did you know the Uzbecks actually lament not having been colonized by the British?  I'll bet you didnt'!

"Peter the so-called Great who, noticing that the English had colonies in India, decided that Russia had to have colonies in Central Asia. The Russians were very different from the English, who had sent to India not muzhiks (peasants) but aristocrats.  "Things would have gone better for us if we had been colonized by the English" Dilorom said.  It was one of their idées reçues.: they all thought of India as their missed fate"  pg 237

Throughout the book Batuman also regales the reader with some wonderful anecdotes about figures of history we may or may not have heard of. One that I was most fascinated with is, the "seven-foot, 280-pound" Empress Anna who was the great niece of Peter The Great.  Also fascinating are stories from the life of Chekhov, Pushkin and Dostoevsky among many others.

Anyone picking up this book hoping to be engaged in an intense discussion of Russian literature is in for a disappointment. Even the chapter devoted to the Dostoevsky novel that gives the book its title (narrating the descent into madness of a circle of intellectuals in a remote Russian province) spends most of its pages detailing how disturbingly her friends in graduate school replicated the same story. But she writes with such charm, such cleverness and wit, you'll be enchanted and very glad you stayed for the literary romp through obscure, but wonderfully entertaining tales surrounding the lives of Russian authors.

To close, the one very important message I took away from this book is that when you go after your passion (in Batuman's case it was to learn all there is to learn about Russian literature) you just never know where the road might lead you, but the journey will definitely be very interesting.

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

• Category: Social Science - Ethnic Studies - Asian American Studies
• Format: Hardcover, 336 pages
• On Sale: December 29, 2009
• Publishers:  Random House, Canada

For the most part North Korea remains a dark, inscrutable place. Journalists, tourists and AID agencies are allowed in but with severe restrictions. They are usually not allowed beyond Pyonyang, the Potemkin village-like capital, and they (especially journalists) are assigned "minders" whose job is to make sure no unauthorized conversations or reporting take place. When Barbara Demick moved to Seoul as a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, her job was to cover both the Koreas, but as no contact was permitted with the North Korean people she took to talking to North Koreans who had defected to South Korean and in time a picture of real life in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea began to emerge which she put into words for articles written for the Los Angeles Times.

Eventually after seven years of conversations with North Koreans, she decided she would tell their stories in a book titled "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea" -  a title inspired by a North Korean children's song which boasts that the N.Korean people have nothing to envy of the rest of the world.  Nothing could be further from the truth as Demick very ably describes in this beautifully-written narrative of life in the Hermit Kingdom.

For the book she focuses on people that came from a place called "Chonglin", N.Korea's third-largest city and one of the places that were hardest hit by the terrible famine of the mid-1990's. It is also almost entirely closed to foreigners.

Funnily enough, North Korea hasn't always been this hopeless. In its early history, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was actually considered a success case in economic development. In the 1960s, the "Korean economic miracle" referred to the steel plants and electrified transport networks of the DPRK, but as South Korea, China (1980) and even Vietnam (1990) embraced market reforms the chasm between North Korea and its neighbors grew wider...South Korea grew richer while its neighbor to the North kept getting poorer.

Also, all through the '70's fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, X-ray machines and more were coming at a low or no cost from Moscow, East Berlin and Prague.With the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc 20 years ago there was a sharp decline in Soviet aid and credit, which could not be replaced by the less advanced Chinese, thus the North’s economy was in free fall...

The country’s electricity supply collapsed. Factories went silent. Salaries went unpaid. Food disappeared. Families foraged for grass, and ground the barks of pine trees into a flour substitute in hopes of staving off death. Corpses piled up. Animals that might have provided food disappeared; even frogs were hunted to near extinction.

However, "People did not go passively to their deaths, when the public distribution system was cut off, they were forced to tap their deepest wells of creativity to feed themselves. They devised traps out of buckets and strings to catch small animals in the field, draped nets over balconies to snare sparrows."

By 1996, North Korea was in the grip of one of the deadliest famines in modern times. Much of Demick's book is devoted to that time period when an immobile, totalitarian country was transformed into a place of "wandering swallows" (children whose parents had died or gone off to find food) stealing fruit and hunting frogs; middle-aged women who had never worked before bartering skills for food in the black markets; college-educated women wading half-naked across the Tumen River to sell themselves into arranged marriages with Chinese farmers; family patriarchs making sure that the food gets to the younger members of the family first often going raving mad before a quiet, hideous death from starvation.

Demick, (through the eyes of six ordinary North Koreans including a female doctor, a pair of star-crossed lovers, a factory worker and an orphan) describes the harrowing toll of mass hunger on the basic institutions and infrastructure of North Korean life. Its tales of mass starvation, brutal political repression, citizens working long days  followed by hours of ideological training at night; gulags; neighbour spying on neighbour, and a communist regime which seemed intent to blame the “American imperialist bastards,” for having created the famine by imposing blockades on North Korea does not make pretty reading, but you will be riveted because the rationalist in you will keep asking if this post-apocalyptic scenario really could have happened...in this modern day and age...where new reporting has scaled new heights...can a place like North Korea actually exist? How do they exist? How do they keep their population so ignorant?

The truth of the matter is that North Korea sadly is a place where transistor radios were/are tuned into domestic services only, the only country on earth not connected to the world wide web, no mobile phones, also, a rigorous system of passes largely forbade internal travel.  North Korea manages to seal its inhabitants off from any outside influences, while at the same time inculcating a belief that North Korea is a paradise.

While North Korea may not have been a paradise, defectors had very mixed successes when they arrived into South Korea.   It is not easy for people earning less than a dollar per month be integrated into the world's thirteenth-largest economy.  A good deal of propaganda on both side of the DMZ is devoted to how North and South Koreans are the same (one people, one nation), but after 60 years of separation the differences between the people are significant.  South Korea is one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world while people in North Korea don't have access to the internet.  North Korea has been frozen culturally and economically for the last 50 years so even the languages are no longer the same.  South Koreans pepper their Korean with a lot of English slang words. Physically too, the people have grown apart with the average 17-year old South Korean boy being atleast 5 inches taller than his North Korean compatriot!

For all the support provided by the South Korean government, defectors often find it hard to settle down in their new homeland. It is not easy for somebody who's escaped a totalitarian country to live in the free world.  Defectors have to rediscover who they are in a world that offers endless possibilities.  Choosing where to live what to do, even which clothes to put on in the morning can be utterly paralyzing for people who've had decisions made for them by the state their entire lives. They are also desperately lonely when they first arrive in SK and have a hard time understanding South Korean etiquette, often mistaking sympathy for condescension.  Defectors are also nagged by the impermanence of their situation.  Many fled with the conviction that Kim Jon-il's regime was close to collapse and that within a few years they would be back "home".  Sadly, it's 2010 now and that still hasn't happened.   Many left parents and children behind whom they will probably never see again in this lifetime.   If that is not depressing, what is?  Finally, the qualities most prized in South Korea are height, fair skin, affluence, prestigious degrees, designer clothes and English-language proficiency.  And these qualities are precisely those that the newly arrived defector lacks which accounts for a low self-esteem, making it virtually impossible for them to shine in social or professional settings.

Some might question Demick’s heavy reliance on the accounts of defectors, but because much of North Korea is so impenetrable there is no other way to tell these stories. She explains that she corroborated the stories with publicly-reported events and cross-checked the accounts with reports by nongovernmental organizations and other defectors.  One can only hope that one day North Korea will be open and we will be able to judge for ourselves what really happened there.

In closing I really must commend Demick for this wonderful expose on the world's last totalitarian regime.  She writes with such sensitivity, grace,skill  and novelistic detail you will be completely drawn into the lives of these poor, unfortunate people.  As with all good writers, she leaves herself out of the picture and takes us into the minds of her subjects until they no longer are the grey-clad people marching in unison that we see on TV, but people like you and I with dreams, hopes and desires.