North Korea. Known for destitution, dictatorship, and perhaps most of all, restricting access to any information from the outside world. But a glimmer of hope appears in these changing times as reports filter in of foreign fiction present in the DPRK.
The presence of any foreign literature at all within the borders of China's hermetic neighbor would've been notable a decade back. One defector told NKnews that she had no experiences of foreign novels before she left the country seven years ago. Even expressing curiosity towards the outside world, she said, was dangerous.
Government-friendly titles like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Gulliver's Travels, and Robinson Crusoe are available in Korean in stores, and Gone with the Wind is especially popular. Anything with an overt political message is out, as are most modern works, but Western, Chinese, and Russian classics have been available for some time.
It’s not easy to get your hands on them, though. A single book can run about USD5 - an average worker’s monthly income estimated to be around USD40 - and a lot of people resort to black market dealings to get their fix, a la Fahrenheit 451 (one title that we assume is probably less-than-approved). Books available at public libraries and chaekbang (book rooms) are invariably cherry-picked by the government, and most often largely propagandist.
But things ease up a little as you move toward the relatively cosmopolitan Pyongyang. The larger English-speaking population in the city seems to have way more access to modern books than we would've thought. Simon Cockrell, a frequent visitor to the country, says that if someone were to tell him they’d read a fairly recent foreign release, he would “not consider that particularly remarkable in Pyongyang,” and that the Harry Potter series is increasingly popular with young women. These kinds of books, he says, would most likely come from a foreigner or high-ranking friend who’d traveled abroad – not from a Pyongyang bookstore.
Even so, this kind of reading is a big jump from last generation’s, in which a big portion of the country’s literature intake appears to have been authored by Kim Il-Sung. We’re pretty surprised about Harry Potter, and left asking the questions: how heavily edited are these newer titles being released, and will the influx of information help the North Korean people climb their way out of the Forbidden Forest of totalitarianism? We’re left waiting for the next chapter.
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