The Accusation
Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A PEN Translates Award-winning collection of short stories about life in North Korea under Kim Jong-Il, written in secret by a dissident author.
The Accusation is a revelatory work of fiction that exposes the truth of the North Korean regime. Set during the period of Kim Jong-Il’s leadership, the seven stories that make up The Accusation throw light on different aspects of life in this most bizarre and horrifying of dictatorships.
One story, “Life of a Swift Seed,” tells of a war hero and former ardent Communist who plants an elm tree in his back garden to commemorate one of his brothers-in-arms. When the tree is to be cut down to make way for a power line, the man is ready to defend it with his life, leaving a family friend to decide whether to intercede. In another story, “City of Specters,” a Pyongyang mother’s young son misbehaves during a party rally, crying out when he sees a portrait of Karl Marx, whom he thinks is a monster of Korean myth known as the Eobi. In one other story, a mother attempts to feed her husband during the worst years of North Korea’s famine, and in another, a woman in a perilous situation meets the Dear Leader himself.
As a whole, The Accusation is a vivid and frightening portrait of what it means to live in a completely closed-off society, and a heartbreaking yet hopeful portrayal of the humanity that persists even in such dire circumstances.
“Searing fiction by an anonymous dissident . . . A fierce indictment of life in the totalitarian North.”—New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With these uncompromising stories, the pseudonymous Bandi gives a rare glimpse of life in the "truly fathomless darkness" of North Korea. A Pyongyang housewife is accused of attempting to communicate with spies for closing her drapes in "City of Specters." In "So Near, Yet So Far," a man finds his village unreachable when he illegally journeys to see his dying mother. Lacking proper documentation, he is forced into a truck, like a pig "being sent to the slaughterhouse." A similar arc is traced throughout Bandi's collection, but the most cutting story is "Pandemonium." A frustrated Mrs. Oh escapes a provincial train station that has been locked down for 32 hours because Kim Il-Sung is traveling in the area. On the way to a nearby relative's house, she stumbles upon the "Great Leader" himself, a man whose "pale golden clothes seemed to shed a soft veil of mist." Just as he is graciously giving her a ride, her granddaughter suffers a broken leg back at the station when she's "buried in a tide of humanity." Whatever little moral ambiguity the situation might offer is eclipsed by the clarity of Bandi's anger. The story of the Great Leader's kindness begins "ringing out from the loudspeaker" of every town in the nation. The only response possible are the granddaughter's anguished cries, rising in "a full-blown howl." An endnote about how Bandi's collection was smuggled out of the country reveals just how miraculous it is that it exists at all.
