02 Mar / Friend by Nam-nyong Paek, translated by Immanuel Kim [in Booklist]
*STARRED REVIEW
As a Superior Court judge, among Jeong Jin Wu’s most difficult tasks is to resolve divorce petitions and face “the burden of having to deal with another family’s misery.” His latest case involves an opera celebrity and factory worker desperate to terminate their almost-10-year marriage, ruined by emotional and physical violence despite a shared devotion to their 7-year-old son. Wary of “destroy[ing] a family, a unit of society,” Jeong investigates the frayed bonds, becoming more friend than judge. Amidst his ministrations, he examines his own fraught union with his often-absent biologist wife.
As quotidian as the narrative might seem, the shock is in its North Korean genesis, originally published in 1988, released in South Korea in 1992, and in French in 2011. “Friend is unique in the Anglophone publishing landscape in that it is a state-sanctioned novel, written in Korea for North Koreans, by an author in good standing with the regime,” reveals translator Immanuel Kim in his enhancing afterword, in which he also includes fascinating details gleaned from his visit with Nam-nyong Paek in Pyongyang. With still so little known about the North Korean people beyond mostly tortuous escapee narratives, Kim enables a rare, welcome glimpse into “a messy world of human emotions and relationships that is at once entirely alien and eerily familiar.”
Review: “Fiction,” Booklist, March 1, 2020
Readers: Adult
Published: 1988 (North Korea), 2020 (United States)