The Accusation
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Authored by an anonymous writer and smuggled out of North Korea, The Accusation is the first work of fiction to come out of the country and a moving portrayal of life under a totalitarian regime.
In 1989, a North Korean dissident writer, known to us only by the pseudonym Bandi, began to write a series of stories about life under Kim Il-sung’s totalitarian regime. Smuggled out of North Korea and published around the world, The Accusation provides a unique and shocking window into this most secretive of countries.
Bandi’s profound, deeply moving, vividly characterized stories tell of ordinary men and women facing the terrible absurdity of daily life in North Korea: a factory supervisor caught between loyalty to an old friend and loyalty to the Party; a woman struggling to feed her husband through the great famine; the staunch Party man whose actor son reveals to him the theatre that is their reality; the mother raising her child in a world where the all-pervasive propaganda is the very stuff of childhood nightmare.
The Accusation is a heartbreaking portrayal of the realities of life in North Korea. It is also a reminder that humanity can sustain hope even in the most desperate of circumstances — and that the courage of free thought has a power far beyond those who seek to suppress it.
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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.
