The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel Author: Adam Johnson | Language: English | ISBN:
B004X6PRO6 | Format: PDF
The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel Description
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
In this epic, critically acclaimed tour de force, Adam Johnson provides a riveting portrait of a world rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love.
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • LONGLISTED FOR THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION’S ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • WINNER OF THE CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The New Yorker • The Washington Post • Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly • The Wall Street Journal • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Financial Times • Newsweek/The Daily Beast • The Plain Dealer • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • Milwaukee Journal Sentinel • Scott Turow, The Millions • Slate • Salon • BookPage • Shelf Awareness
“The single best work of fiction published [this year] . . . The book’s cunning, flair and pathos are testaments to the still-formidable power of the written word.”—The Wall Street Journal
Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs a work camp for orphans. Superiors in the state soon recognize the boy’s loyalty and keen instincts. Considering himself “a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world,” Jun Do rises in the ranks. He becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his Korean overlords in order to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress “so pure, she didn’t know what starving people looked like.”
Praise for The Orphan Master’s Son
“An exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart.”—Pulitzer Prize citation
“A daring and remarkable novel.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Gripping . . . Deftly blending adventure, surreal comedy and Casablanca-style romance, the novel takes readers on a jolting ride through an Orwellian landscape of dubious identity and dangerous doublespeak.”—San Jose Mercury News
“This is a novel worth getting excited about. . . . Adam Johnson has taken the papier-mâché creation that is North Korea and turned it into a real and riveting place that readers will find unforgettable.”—The Washington Post
“[A] brilliant and timely novel.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Remarkable and heartbreaking . . . To [the] very short list of exceptional novels that also serve a humanitarian purpose The Orphan Master’s Son must now be added.”—The New Republic
“A triumph of imagination . . . [Grade:] A.”—Entertainment Weekly
“A spellbinding saga of subverted identity and an irrepressible love.”—Vogue
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From the Trade Paperback edition.- File Size: 1721 KB
- Print Length: 465 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0812992792
- Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (January 10, 2012)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B004X6PRO6
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #643 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #10
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense - #54
in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary - #76
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Suspense
- #10
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense - #54
in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary - #76
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Suspense
If you were taking one of those free association tests and the tester asked your response to "North Korea," what words and pictures would come to your mind? For most, I suspect it's nameless, faceless workers wearing identical clothing, haircuts and Party badges, living in primitive conditions under the most paranoid, repressive regime imaginable, where the only citizen allowed to be an individual is that short man with the odd jumpsuits and pompadour; i.e., the "Dear Leader," Kim Jong Il. [This review was written before Kim Jong Il's death.]
Adam Johnson shows that there's a lot of life and humanity, and even humor, behind those conceptions of rigid uniformity, especially in his protagonist, Pak Jun Do. When Jun Do meets some Americans (through an amazing series of events), they mis-hear his name as John Doe. That's a revealing mistake. In North America, we use "John Doe" to represent a male character whose identity we don't know. Sometimes we use the name to mean an Everyman. Both are appropriate for Jun Do, who was raised in an orphanage as the son of its master. He doesn't know what happened to his mother and his father is unknowable. His name isn't even his; like all residents of the orphanage, he's been assigned the name of one of Korea's political martyrs.
Jun Do's life, threading through this book, is one of astonishing hardship, pain and endurance. He is a soldier, an intelligence officer on board a fishing boat, a prisoner in a work camp and a torture facility, member of a diplomatic mission, and a man who manages to find love and freedom in a most unlikely way. Through the story of his life, the story of contemporary life in North Korea is revealed in all its black-is-white totalitarian craziness.
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson is set in modern day North Korea. North Korea epitomizes Orwellian horror. This is a country where you can be condemned for no more reason than that the poster of Kim Jong Il on your wall has a torn corner, where children spy on their parents and starvation is a way of life. In Korea, the story about a person is what is important, not the person. If the story changes, then the person had better change himself to fit. Every day there are public service announcements telling the stories of the heroes and enemies of the state.
The protagonist, Jun Do, is named for one of the "heroes of the revolution", a man who committed suicide to prove himself worthy of the revolution. Jun Do's father, the orphan master, never openly acknowledges his son as such and "proves" his love by being more cruel to him than to the orphans in his care. An orphan's lot in North Korea is grim beyond Dickins' tales of early industrial England. Their lives are brutal, short and exploited.
Our protagonist becomes a tunnel soldier, trained in zero light taekwando. He is then conscripted into becoming a kidnapper working in Japan to provide selected individuals to serve Pyongyang's desires. He is successful as a kidnapper and is rewarded by being trained to become an English translator, doing radio surveillance on board a fishing vessel where the sailors all have their wives' pictures tattooed on their chests. He is selected to accompany a State visit to the USA. The visit is something of a humiliation for North Korea and Jun Do is sent off to prison where he kills and takes the place of one of the heroes of modern North Korea, Commander Ga, and falls in love with Ga's wife, Son Moon, a famous movie star.
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