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The Sorcerer of Pyongyang: A Novel - Hardcover

Theroux, Marcel

 
9781668002667: The Sorcerer of Pyongyang: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1668002663 ISBN 13: 9781668002667
Verlag: Atria Books, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

The acclaimed author of the “sublime” (The New York Times) Far North, a finalist for the National Book Award, returns with a mesmerizing novel about a North Korean boy whose life is irrevocably changed when he stumbles across a mysterious Western book—a guide to Dungeons & Dragons.

Ten-year-old Jun-su is a bright and obedient boy whose only desire is to be a credit to his family, his nation, and most importantly, his Dear Leader. However, when he discovers a copy of The Dungeon Master’s Guide, left behind in a hotel room by a rare foreign visitor, a new and colorful world opens up to him.

With the help of an English-speaking teacher, Jun-su deciphers the rules of the famous role-playing game and his imaginary adventures sweep him away from the harsh reality of a famine-stricken North Korea. Over time, the game leads Jun-su on a spellbinding and unexpected journey through the hidden layers of his country, toward precocious success, glory, love, betrayal, prison, a spell at the pinnacle of the North Korean elite, and an extraordinary kind of redemption.

A vivid, uplifting, and deeply researched novel, The Sorcerer of Pyongyang is a love story and a tale of survival against the odds. Inspired by the testimony of North Korean refugees and drawing on the author’s personal experience of North Korea, it explores the power of empathy and imagination in a society where they are dangerous liabilities.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marcel Theroux is a British American novelist and broadcaster who studied English literature at Cambridge University and international relations at Yale. He is the author of several novels, including The Sorcerer of Pyongyang and Far North, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He lives in London.

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1. The Mysterious Book THE MYSTERIOUS BOOK
One Sunday afternoon towards the end of September 1991, a heavyset forty-seven-year-old man with thick glasses and unruly dark hair took his seat on an Ilyushin jet painted in the handsome red and white livery of the North Korean state airline, Choson Minhang.

The man’s name was David Kapsberger, and he was about to fly to North Korea as part of a twenty-strong delegation of radical academics and trade unionists.

As a haze of dirty smoke obscured the skyline of Beijing visible through his window, Kapsberger removed his spectacles and dabbed his face with the warm towel offered by one of the eerily composed female flight attendants. The long hours of travel from his home in London had left Kapsberger feeling worn out. His clothes had suffered too. His lightweight summer suit was crumpled and bore stains from a coffee he’d spilled on himself in the transit lounge at Sheremetyevo Airport.

Across the aisle of the plane, luxuriating in the novelty of an entirely empty row, sat his son, fourteen-year-old Fidel Olatunji-Kapsberger. Fidel had been forced to accompany his father on the trip, which he was fully expecting to find pointless and dull. For the first forty minutes of the two-hour flight, he buried himself in a book, but as the plane crossed into the airspace of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Fidel glanced out of the window and found himself bewitched. The mountainous landscape that broke through the clouds beneath him seemed somehow prehistoric and mysterious, like a version of the imaginary world in the fantasy novel that he was reading.

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.

From the roof of this building an enormous floodlit portrait of the country’s Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, smiled lovingly out across the concrete airstrip, which still radiated warmth after a day of autumn sunshine.

Dusk was falling on the low wooded hills that surrounded the airport. The stillness was strangely oppressive. An unsettling silence enveloped the visitors as they shuffled into the arrivals hall, which was austere and cavernous, and smelled faintly of detergent.

The elder Kapsberger was an American citizen who had emigrated in the sixties to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War. He’d begun a new life in England as a graduate student in the political science department at the London School of Economics. Now he was a full professor and the world’s leading English-speaking expert on Juche thought, Kim Il-sung’s unique philosophy of Marxist self-reliance. However, the professor’s expertise was wholly theoretical; this was his first visit to North Korea. And, like all foreign visitors entering the country for the first time, he felt a thrilling combination of fear and curiosity as he handed over his US passport for inspection.

The fluorescent lighting inside the glass booth was tinged an unearthly shade of orange. It made the immigration officer look like a waxwork in a vitrine. Only his eyes moved, as he lowered and raised them repeatedly in order to compare the photograph in the passport with the reality of the rumpled man in front of him. Behind his impassive face, he was calculating whether Kapsberger was what the government euphemistically called “an impure element.” The professor’s unruly hair, dirty suit, and US citizenship tipped the scales in favor of further investigation.

As the officer waved Kapsberger through, he pressed a concealed button under his desk to ensure that the customs men would search the professor’s luggage with extraordinary care.

The customs men were looking for anything that might confirm the immigration officer’s hunch: including, but not limited to, drugs, precious metals, fissile or radioactive material, pornography, Bibles, subversive literature, weapons or bladed articles, and financial instruments of a value above ten thousand dollars. Needless to say, the professor had none of these things. Finally satisfied, the inspectors left him to repack his ransacked suitcase and join the tour group, to the relief of Fidel, who had been waiting anxiously, having been waved through customs with his own bag unsearched.

Over the subsequent week and a half, the delegation was shown around model farms, a granite quarry, a sewing-machine factory, a youth center containing many preternaturally talented child performers, the Pyongyang Children’s Foodstuffs Factory, and Kim Il-sung University.

Although they were all broadly sympathetic towards the tiny nation’s eccentric experiment with socialism, none of the visitors was comfortable with the ubiquitous propaganda that claimed virtually divine status for the Great Leader. At the same time, they understood that airing these doubts or betraying any hint of mockery would only make life difficult for their North Korean hosts, all of whom wore tiny gold badges over their hearts bearing the Great Leader’s image.

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. Apart from an argument one evening with the minders when a representative from the National Union of Mineworkers finally ventured a criticism about the cult of personality that surrounded the Great Leader, the tour was uneventful.

However, in an act of forgetfulness that was to have enormous repercussions, Fidel left one of his belongings in the room at the Songdowon Hotel in Wonsan that he had shared with his father.

This was a hardback copy of the Dungeon Masters Guide, the core rule book for a popular role-playing game called Dungeons & Dragons that was one of Fidel’s passions. The cover depicted a giant red troll abducting an almost naked blond woman. This image would certainly have resulted in the book’s confiscation on arrival in Pyongyang, had the customs officials not been preoccupied with the moral degeneracy implied by David Kapsberger’s grubby suit and shaggy hair.

A maid, Kim Bok-mi, who found the rule book under the bed when she was preparing the hotel room for a visiting Soviet astrophysicist, was alarmed by the cover. She assumed it to be some form of American propaganda and handed it in to the hotel manager, with many words of apology.

For several days the hotel manager, a man in his late forties called Jon Chol-ju, kept the book in the bottom drawer of his desk. From time to time he would take it out and leaf through its pages while smoking the strong mentholated foreign cigarettes that were one of the perks of his job. Mr. Jon was an educated man who spoke a number of languages, including English, but the book must have been a puzzle to him. It wasn’t a genre he recognized. Some of the illustrations were clearly decadent, but they weren’t explicit enough to be usefully pornographic. Eventually he consigned it to his lost property collection.

In fairness, the book and the activity it described baffled many of its readers, even outside the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. It contained the rules for a complex game of make-believe set in a world of medieval technology, monsters, and magical powers.

When Jon Chol-ju died of a heart attack a short time later after a drinking binge, the new hotel...

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Verlag
Atria Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668002663
ISBN 13 
9781668002667
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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