The Orphan Master's Son, Johnson - B +, Inc.

                                             This brilliant novel was published five years ago, won a Pulitzer, and was recommended to me by Greg Weiss. The first half of the book is about Jung So, who was raised in an orphanage, trained as a tunnel rat for the Army, assigned to a unit that kidnapped people off Japanese beaches and was then sent to language school. Able to understand and transcribe English, he was placed on a a fishing boat as an intelligence officer. Although the story rambles, it entices by telling of the extreme poverty, absurd philosophies and baffling primitive life of the people in North Korea. The fishing boat, some leftover Soviet wreck, has no running water, toilets or even a life raft. And the sailors don't expect those comforts. The home port has a new tin factory because the old one gave everyone botulism and of course, there is no medicine or doctors, so lots of people simply die. And they often die in the dark, because there's no electricity at night in the Hermit Kingdom. Throughout North Korea, there are loudspeakers in almost all work places and dormitories reporting on news, warning about the next American sneak attack and singing the praises of the ruling family.
                                           Perhaps it was a personal distraction, but I got so confused in the second chapter, where the book turns from one to three narrators, that I gave up. It involves a somewhat ditzy Kim Jong Il and a truly flaky set of twists and turns. The book is invariably described as brilliant. That said, I am comforted by the 'New Yorker' review that says "the Candide-like picaresque of the first half - with its absurd but fully plausible turns of the screw - persuasively evokes life under brutal totalitarianism, the identity-switching and intrigue of the second part seem to originate in little more than the need to spin a yarn. When Johnson echoes the plot of 'Casablanca', the absurdity that characterizes life in a totalitarian state devolves into narrative improbability."
                                            Although I elected to not finish this book, I acknowledge its brilliance and appreciate the insights into a very different, and by my assessment, very strange place.