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Korea Blog: The Making of a Dictator in Anna Fifield’s “The Great Successor”

I first learned of Kim Jong Il at the same time I learned of the country he ruled, and for years thereafter had no image to associate with North Korea but that of the high-living, Hollywood-obsessed Dear Leader with permed hair and platform shoes. This was back in my high school days of the late 1990s and early 2000s, a time when it came as a surprise that eccentric third-world dictators still existed at all. In subsequent years Kim would become more and more an international figure of fun, a process that culminated in his appearance as a grotesque marionette in South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s film Team America: World Police. By the time Kim died in 2011 I had learned much more about both Koreas, North and South, but the only thing that struck me as notable about his son and successor Kim Jong-un was his having been born the same year as I was.

Though less of an oddity than his father, Kim Jong Un has proven to be the more compelling figure, especially to consumers of news in the West. That goes even more so for producers of news like Washington Post Beijing bureau chief Anna Fifield, who began her career in Asia in 2004 when the Financial Times sent her to Seoul. She eventually developed a desire to “find out everything there was to know” about the current ruler of North Korea, and its fruit is the new book The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un. Applied by Fifield herself or not, that subtitle reflects the tone of the book, many of whose chapters open with epigraphs quoting the characteristically bombastic, tortured English in which North Korean propaganda pronounces on such subjects as the “monumental edifices of eternal value” built across that “socialist land of bliss,” the “thrice-cursed acts of treachery” committed a disgraced party member (Kim’s uncle Jang Song Thaek, whose subsequent execution was ordered by Kim himself), and the “icon of cultural efflorescence” that is the city of Pyongyang.

Few observers can resist the chance to poke fun at North Korea’s rhetoric, or indeed any other aspect of how the impoverished, belligerent “Hermit Kingdom” presents itself to the world. At the same time, the country also offers its observers an almost unparalleled opportunity to fire off high-handed pronouncements of their own, usually moral in character, on everything from the gulag-like system of prison camps made for dissenters to the enforced drabness of the clothing and hairstyles seen on the streets of the capital. “May you soon be free to follow your dreams,” Fifield writes to the people ruled over by the Kim dynasty in her book’s dedication, a statement neither particularly patronizing nor self-serving, which makes it quite refreshing by the standards of writing and speaking on North Korea — standards against which The Great Successor measures in every way as a superior work.

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.