The elder Kapsberger was an American citizen who had emigrated in the sixties to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War. Jun-su bowed happily in reply and began a speech of thanks for the card and flowers they had sent him. Reading The Sorcerer of Pyongyang is an informative and entertaining way to learn about North Korea. Not everyone had the courage and presence of mind of the heroic schoolgirl martyr Han Hyong-gyong who had managed to tread water while holding two plastic-wrapped portraits above a rising flood until she finally succumbed to exhaustion and drowned.

The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by Marcel Theroux | Waterstones

This manual becomes Jun-su’s entry point into role-playing games, and into the world of storytelling.Jun-su isn’t one of North Korea’s elite; he has the typical problems of a high school student anywhere, in addition to the horrors of widespread famine around him and endless political requirements, such as the mandatory weekly self-criticism sessions that require public confessions of wrongdoings from all citizens.

The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by Marcel Theroux | Goodreads

The school sent the senior class representative, a boy named Seo Tae-il, to check on Jun-su that afternoon and report back. The book she was referring to was the ledger in which she recorded all the shortcomings of the building’s residents. You can tell your father I don’t need his fish,” said Teacher Kang grumpily, settling back down onto his mattress. Didn’t the Great Leader himself say: ‘If a man does not read the books he wants to because he has been prohibited from doing so, how can he undertake a great cause?Unfortunately, the scientists who discovered it were immediately kidnapped by mercenaries working for the US government. On the last day, as the children assembled to march off to the railway station for the twelve-hour journey home, Dr. So-dok would have been risking his life to take anything from the hotel kitchen, but because he was fed at work, there was more food to go round for Jun-su and his mother. A moment later, he was sitting on a low cot in a hut while the collective farm’s medical officer pressed a stethoscope to his chest. You approach the hut,” he said in the low, serious voice he used for explaining the hardest math problems.

BBC Sounds - The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by Marcel Theroux BBC Sounds - The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by Marcel Theroux

At first, Jun-su’s mother stood at the doorway watching the sessions, but after a while, she left them alone. His nostrils were full of the smell of damp earth and the oily smoke of the torches that lit the darkness. It was an uncontrollable shudder that started at his feet and jerked his back and shoulders like the cracking of a whip.Marcel travelled throughout Japan trying to understand the aesthetic tastes of Japan and its people.

The Sorcerer of Pyongyang | Marcel Theroux | 9781668002667 The Sorcerer of Pyongyang | Marcel Theroux | 9781668002667

There were many empty spaces in the classroom that belonged to boys who had been taken out of school.

The underground tunnels turned out to be the hiding place for the priests of a sinister cult who had conjured the skeletons to life from the graves around the village. Inspired by the testimony of North Korean refugees, and drawing on the author’s personal experience of North Korea, it testifies to the power of empathy and the human imagination. In the foreground of the picture with their backs to the viewer, a knight and a sorcerer, dwarfed by the red giant, also struggled to overpower him.