The Sorcerer of Pyongyang

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When he got back to the apartment he shared with his wife and young son, he dumped the book in a closet containing bedding and more or less forgot about it. As the old teacher tottered on his thin and unsteady legs, three soldiers stepped forward and discharged their weapons three times each with loud cracks. The announcer explained that it was an unprecedented and visionary application of the Juche philosophy: a single ostrich egg was the equivalent of twenty-four hen’s eggs and could easily feed eight people. On Teacher Kang’s next visit, he brought an exercise book and several sets of the split twigs, flat on one side and rounded on the other, that are used for playing the game of yut.

The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by Marcel Theroux | Goodreads The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by Marcel Theroux | Goodreads

Ultimately, Theroux celebrates the incredible magic of storytelling by giving us this amazing story. Some of the illustrations were clearly decadent, but they weren’t explicit enough to be usefully pornographic. Theroux makes the choice to tell Jun-Su's story in a journalistic, almost clinical, style, but that didn't take away from my enjoyment of Sorcerer at all. The visitors attended the Mass Games in Kim Il-sung Stadium, climbed the Tower of the Juche Idea from whose viewing platform Pyongyang resembled a diorama of gray matchboxes, spent two days at a beach resort in the seaside town of Wonsan, and were treated to a series of long drunken meals by their hosts.Coupons were handed out as usual for rice, cooking oil, meat, and the occasional gray slab of frozen pollock, but when citizens turned up to exchange the vouchers for food at the state-run distribution centers, they were told the shelves were empty. Jun-su’s student life in Pyongyang looks idyllic: he drinks with friends, begins a secret role-playing group on campus, and starts dating a girl from the Pyongyang elite. He went on to study English at Clare College of the University of Cambridge and international relations at Yale University. Out of gratitude, they gave Bong Chon-ju not only the one hundred gold pieces they’d promised as payment, but a magic shirt that protected him from fire and a spell book with two new spells in it: “Speak with Animals” and “Detect Treasure. so the premise that a poor boy from north korea comes across a game manual and it provides him a form of escapism from some of the most difficult circumstances in life is a story than i fully support.

The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by Marcel Theroux | Goodreads

He’d begun a new life in England as a graduate student in the political science department at the London School of Economics. A compulsively readable tale, all the better for being set in one of the most secretive countries in the world. Jun-su is frightened by the book’s inscrutable contents—foreign media is suspect under the dictatorship’s iron rule—but he begins to decipher the book with the help of an English-speaking teacher, who dubs the game the House of Possibility. An enormous horned red giant was holding a naked woman in one hand and a massive sword in the other. This novel encompasses an entire life, a life lived in the strangest most isolated and (possibly) most terrifying country on Earth.Trying not to disturb the needles in his chest, Jun-su slid his hand under the mattress to retrieve the mysterious book. I didn’t care for the matter-of-fact writing and swift passage of time that happens throughout the book, but at the same time I couldn’t put it down and easily found myself invested in the characters. Across the aisle of the plane, luxuriating in the novelty of an entirely empty row, sat his son, fourteen-year-old Fidel Olatunji-Kapsberger. His nostrils were full of the smell of damp earth and the oily smoke of the torches that lit the darkness. 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.

The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by Marcel Theroux review – one man

The announcer was reporting on the visit of the Dear Leader to a new ostrich farm outside Pyongyang. His eyes kept stealing enviously towards the half-empty bottle of Japanese perfume in the hand of the chambermaid who had chosen before him. Most crucially, the novel powerfully embodies the plight of North Koreans in the state’s vast shadow: “How much of their lives was spent in waiting!However he fell in love with a beautiful girl with connections in Pyongyang named Su-ok who rises to power in the North Korean bureaucracy eventually becoming the lover of Jimi, a son of Kim-Jong-il. After a sudden descent and an abrupt landing that left the tour party shaken, the passengers made their way down the boarding ramp and towards the boxy Soviet-style terminal. Here the chief of the People’s Unit was a man who was studying an old copy of the Rodong Sinmun through a pair of reading glasses held together with old tape.