Los Angeles Times - 25.08.2019

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LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR SUNDAY, AUGUST 25, 2019F7


BOOK REVIEW


The Great Successor
The Divinely Perfect Destiny of
Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un


Anna Fifield
PublicAffairs: 336 pages; $28


Both inherited a family busi-
ness and are surrounded by syco-
phants.
Both make endless false claims,
blame others for their mistakes
and have been lampooned — and
vastly underestimated — by their
critics.
One boasts he is a “super ge-
nius,” the other a “genius among
geniuses.” One blasts the other as a
“total nut job” and is called “an old
lunatic” in return. One is “beloved
and respected leader,” the other
“your favorite president, me!”
Is it any wonder that President
Trump and North Korea’s Kim
Jong Un get along so well?
Anna Fifield’s “The Great Suc-
cessor: The Divinely Perfect Des-
tiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong
Un” is required reading to fully ap-
preciate Trump’s bizarre bro-
mance with the young tyrant. The
leaders have met three times, and
while Kim shows no sign of giving
up his nuclear weapons, Trump
seemed smitten by what he calls
“love letters” from the dictator.
Admittedly, the first serious
English-language biography of
Kim is less playful than its title sug-
gests.
The veteran Washington Post
correspondent has produced a ma-
cabre portrait of a ruling dynasty
that has inexplicably survived for
seven decades — nearly as long as
the Soviet Union before it im-
ploded. If the prose sometimes
lags, the reporting is groundbreak-
ing because of Fifield’s dozen or so
visits to North Korea and her
dogged ability to track down Kim’s
childhood playmates, relatives and
others around the globe.
Kim was only 27 when he as-
sumed power in December 2011 af-
ter the death of his father, Kim
Jung Il. Wailing crowds lined the
streets for the stage-managed fu-
neral, but few mourned a cruel
leader who was the “world’s largest
buyer of Hennessy Paradise co-
gnac” at the height of a terrible
famine in the mid-1990s, Fifield
writes.
Little was known about the
pudgy young heir, even by the
South Korean intelligence agen-
cies that obsessively track their
northern neighbor.
Fifield reveals that Kim was
sent at age 12 to study under a fake
name and a Brazilian passport at
an elite private school in Bern,
Switzerland. He became obsessed
with action star Jean-Claude Van
Damme and the Chicago Bulls.
Guarded by an aunt and uncle —
whom Fifield interviewed in exile
— he swam on the French Riviera,
skied in the Alps and visited Euro
Disney in Paris.
The idyll ended when he was or-
dered home to attend Kim Il Sung
Military University, named for his
grandfather and founder of the to-
talitarian state. Needless to say, he
graduated as the top student. In
2009, when he was 25, his ailing fa-
ther named him successor, and
propaganda organs quickly spun a
personality cult around him. It was


the first time most North Koreans
knew he existed.
They were told Kim could drive
a car and hit a light bulb with a rifle
at 100 yards, all by age 3. An official
biography claimed “he had perfect
pitch, that he could ride the wildest
horses at age six, and [at age 9] had
twice beaten a visiting European
powerboat-racing champion.”
The official humbug helped
hide that Kim had no political or
military experience when he took
over. U.S. officials hoped the coun-
try’s first Western-educated leader
would finally reform the Stalinist
state and join the outside world.
Other experts predicted mass in-
stability or a military coup. No one
knew.
Foreigners mocked his balloon-
ing girth, high-fade haircut and at-
tire “fashionable only in Commu-

nist holdover states,” as Fifield
puts it. In China, North Korea’s
closest ally, he was ridiculed as
“Kim Fatty the Third” despite Chi-
nese censors’ efforts to erase the
nickname from the internet. He
gave himself a slew of obsequious
titles, including my favorite: “best
incarnation of love.”
But Kim proved far more adept
that his skeptics and foes ex-
pected. His father had spoken only
once in public — and only a single
phrase — during 17 years in abso-
lute power. Kim addressed a bank
of microphones months after tak-
ing office. He also launched the
North Korean version of a charm
offensive — visiting schools, hospi-
tals and farms, hugging children
and smiling for the cameras.
More important, he allowed ad
hoc private markets to open for the
first time, a move that has raised
living standards and eased the
country’s desperate poverty. North
Korea now has a vibrant entrepre-
neurial class, and by most esti-
mates the economy is growing
steadily despite international
sanctions.
But repression remains brutal
and pervasive. Cellphones are not
connected to the outside world,
and there is no internet access.
“Every household has a radio atta-
ched to the wall that can never be
turned off and can never be tuned
to a different station,” Fifield
notes. It always extols the genius
and beneficence of the Kim dy-
nasty, she adds.
Worse, a U.N. special commis-
sion found in 2014 that rape, tor-
ture, starvation and other abuses
at North Korea’s vast political pris-
ons were “essential components”

of Kim’s rule. It recommended he
face charges of crimes against hu-
manity.
Early on, Kim consolidated his
grip on power with purges of for-
mer top aides.
One senior army general didn’t
just disappear, he ceased to exist,
his face erased from official photos
and name deleted from docu-
ments. The de facto defense min-
ister was publicly executed by anti-
aircraft gun. Among his alleged
transgressions was falling asleep
while Kim was speaking.
Kim’s uncle by marriage, once
one of the regime’s most powerful
figures, was declared “despicable
human scum” and also executed.
His supposed crimes included not
clapping loud enough for Kim.
In February 2017, Kim’s older
half brother was assassinated in a
busy airport terminal in Malaysia,
garnering global headlines. Kim
Jong Nam died, in terrible pain,
barely 15 minutes after two women
had rushed up and rubbed two
chemicals on his face that, when
combined, formed the deadly VX
nerve agent.
Kim Jong Nam had lived in
Macao for years, apparently run-
ning online gambling sites, but Fi-
field reports he was also a CIA in-
formant. It seems plausible: He
was carrying $120,000 in cash and 12
vials of antidote for poisons, in-
cluding VX, when he was killed, she
says.
The two women, one from Viet-
nam and one from Indonesia,
claimed they thought they were
part of a TV prank show. They were
charged with murder but ulti-
mately were released.
Kim, Fifield writes, was “send-

ing a defiant public message to de-
fectors: wherever you are, we can
get you — and it will hurt.” Kim, she
added, also sent a message to the
world. “He had his own flesh and
blood killed with a chemical weap-
on in a crowded public place. So
what? The verbal condemnation
was swift but there was little other
real effect on Pyongyang.”
More worrying, of course, are
Kim’s nuclear weapons and ballis-
tic missiles. North Korea has con-
ducted six nuclear tests, four since
Kim took power. The most power-
ful, a suspected thermonuclear de-
vice, was detonated nine months
after Trump entered the White
House.
U.S. officials say Kim has
steadily expanded his nuclear ar-
senal in the 18 months since he has
begun sharing mash notes with
Trump.
Like Trump, Kim’s critics — at
least those safely overseas — have
mocked him every step of the way.
But Fifield convincingly argues
that while ruthless, Kim has acted
in a rational, calculating way that
has worked to his advantage.
His state propaganda certainly
agrees. In 2017, North Korea
boasted that 67.4 million stories
were published about Kim — in
English — in a 10-day period, or
230,000 an hour. Even Trump
couldn’t claim that.

Drogin is Washington deputy
bureau chief for The Times. He is
the author of “Curveball: Spies,
Lies, and the Con Man Who
Caused a War,” which won the 2007
Cornelius Ryan Award for best
nonfiction book on international
affairs.

Beyond Kim Jong Un’s border


By Bob Drogin


NORTH KOREANleader Kim Jong Un, center, inspects an army submarine. News correspondent Anna Fifield probes his regime.

Korean Central News Agency

PublicAffairs

The World Doesn’t


Require You


Rion Amilcar Scott
Liveright: 384 pages, $25.95


Imagine a world where the son
of God is alive and leading a strug-
gling church gospel band. It’s also
where a new, highly advanced line
of service robots must confront
their programming after being de-
signed to resemble lawn jockeys,
and a hitchhiker inadvertently
finds himself on a road trip along
the Underground Railroad.
Welcome to the imaginary town
of Cross River, Md., the setting for
Rion Amilcar Scott’s vivid “The
World Doesn’t Require You.” The
fiction collection is a rich, genre-
splicing mix of alternate history,
magical realism and satire that in-
terrogates race, sexism and where
both meet here in the real world.
This is Scott’s second visit to
Cross River, also home to his Pen/
Robert W. Bingham Prize-winning
2016 “Insurrections.” In addition to
the above curiosities, the town also
lays claim to being the site of the
only successful slave rebellion in
U.S. history and is the meeting
point of all sorts of past and pre-
sent issues surrounding race.
Cross River stands in tragic
contrast to the neighboring white-
dominated town of Port Yooga. But
Scott’s imagination runs deeper
than simply placing his characters


in opposition to a single force and
instead examines the ways that
oppression is passed down and
continues to thrive.
Consider the robot at the heart
of “The Electric Joy of Service.”
Told from the perspective of the
new being (who shares a name
with Twain’s escaped slave in
“Huckleberry Finn”), the story be-
gins with the robot’s inventor rev-
eling in the absurd shock of a racist
design. “Rich whites will rush out
to buy their own robot slaves,”
Jim’s Master assures his corporate
investors, who are initially aghast.
“And we can make these things any
race the customer pleases.”
The Robotic Personal Helpers
(or Riffs) are a hit, however. After
being betrayed by his partners, the
Master uploads a virus to spread
the facts behind Cross River to
spur a cyborg rebellion. But he
spares his first creation. “For you,”
he promises Jim, “a gift: a patch
to block the disease of history. Go
on being content.”
It’s one of a few bitingly drawn
scenarios that bring to mind the
work of Paul Beatty, whose 2015
novel “The Sellout” won the
Booker Prize with its barbed cri-
tique of post-racial America, or
even the pointed surrealism of
Boots Riley’s 2018 film “Sorry to
Bother You.” But Scott digs a
little deeper, returning to Jim in a
later, longer story, “Mercury in
Retrograde,” which finds Jim fall-
ing in love, yet in increased conflict
with a more advanced new cre-
ation called Fiona.

Partly human and designed to
satisfy the Master’s longing for
controllable female companion-
ship (and all the misogyny that
implies), Fiona grows frustrated
in both her role and with Jim’s
reluctance to pursue freedom —
even as he grows to understand the
hatred in his appearance and in
turn how bigotry is internalized.
“I was disgusting,” Jim says. “My
very existence a kind of hateful-
ness. Anyone who saw me would
hate me. The more I studied, the
more I asked: How could I not, like-
wise, hate me?”
But as they grow together,
Fiona and Jim are driven apart

as he’s proved unable to evolve
far enough. “One can only fight
their programming so much,” Jim
admits to Fiona.
Scott has as vivid ear for de-
scription and pace, rendering one
nightmarish story that feels like an
unaired episode of Jordan Peele’s
“Twilight Zone” reboot. Beginning
with someone hitching a ride from
a stranger into Cross River, the
story wryly named after the chorus
of Dr. Dre’s 1993 single “Let Me
Ride” culminates in a drug-addled
fever dream where images of racist
caricatures merge with a party re-
plete with sly nods to the Wizard of
Oz, R. Kelly and a “comedian who

hadn’t made a funny remark in
years” who delights those in a
crowd by berating them.
While Scott needs only a few
pages to make an impact, he de-
votes the bulk of “The World
Doesn’t Require You” to the nov-
ella-length closer, “Special Topics
in Loneliness Studies.” Telling the
story of an academic rivalry at
Cross River’s historically black
Freedman’s University, “Special
Topics” at first feels elusive, with
a kitchen sink construction of
emails, PowerPoint slides, essays
and imagined folklore amid an
unreliable narration, but it co-
alesces into an indictment of a
patriarchal academic system that
diminishes female voices.
Scott delivers his most direct
critique via a student — primarily
seen through her emails — who
looks past the institution to a
larger world where loneliness is
“a motivator of low-level human
tyranny.” The story connects to
the upheaval of 2019 in a way that
few recent works of fiction have.
“I don’t wish to end my loneli-
ness,” she writes, defying the
course’s goals. “I wish to learn
from it, to grow from it so I can
enjoy the inevitable and brief mo-
ments of oneness that are on the
other side of isolation.” It’s far
from the answer the professor
had hoped for, but in the hands
of someone as skilled as Scott, it’s
impossible to deny.

Barton is a former Times staff
writer now based in Portland, Ore.

Tyranny aplenty. Somehow it all computes


By Chris Barton


Rebecca Aranda
RION AMILCAR SCOTTtackles race and sexism in new book.

Liveright
Free download pdf