This is an important, brilliantly conceived, though not always pleasant to read, novel. At its center is Pak Jun Do, who withstands all sorts of brutality in the absurdly surreal world of North Korea. He goes from being an orphan, to a kidnapper, to a radio man on a fishing ship to a prisoner, and then finally assumes the identity of a national hero/tae kwondo champion who belongs to Kim Jung Il's inner circle and is the husband of the country's greatest national actress. The tales of how human life is so grotesquely devalued - from kidnapping innocent victims off Japanese soil to performing lobotomies on prisoners with nails over their eyeballs - make for difficult reading. But it remains a triumphant story about how this one character attempts to persevere, while everything he could hold precious, including his own identity, is stolen from him. The descriptions of the places he brings his mind to escape the physical torture or the things he must do to avoid starvation in prison camps, like eating moths, are delivered with brilliant prose. I read an interview with Adam Johnson in which he mentioned an upcoming memoir from someone who lived in a Korean gulag that details brutalities far in excess of any of those here. He also said he had to hold back and not match some of the more outlandish things Kim Jung Il actually did because it would have strained readers' credulity. It is hard to believe that a far more sadistic world than the one Orwell describes in 1984 actually exists somewhere, but this novel, in a magnificently literary way, offers a glimpse into just how cruelly distorted the world of North Korea is.