Plot
Delisle arrives in Pyongyang, bringing, in addition to the items that he was authorized to bring into the country, a copy of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, that he judged appropriate for a totalitarian state, CDs of Aphex Twin and reggae, and presents like Gitanes cigarettes and Hennessy cognac.
Delisle encounters former colleagues working at SEK Studio on an adaptation of Corto Maltese comics. He also meets foreign diplomats, NGO workers in the World Food Programme, and businessmen, such as French engineers installing an HDTV transmitter.
During his two month visit, he stays at the Yanggakdo Hotel, and visits other foreigners in the Koryo Hotel. Accompanied by his guide, he visits the massive statue of Kim Il-sung, the Pyongyang Metro, the legation quarter, the Diplomatic Club (former Romanian embassy), the Arch of Triumph, the Juche Tower, the International Friendship Exhibition, the USS Pueblo, the enormous Ryugyong Hotel, the Taekwondo Hall, the Children's Palace, and the Museum of Imperialist Occupation.
Delisle is surprised by things such as reverse walking, the absence of disabled and elderly people, North Korean music propaganda, the cult of personality for past leader Kim Il-Sung and his son Kim Jong-Il, the required presence of his translator and guide, nearly-expired water from the South, Coca-Cola and kimjongilias. He also notes the extreme level of apparent brainwashing in the citizens of Pyongyang perhaps prompted by the oppressive atmosphere of the area. When questioned regarding the lack of disabled people in Pyongyang, his guide asserts, and seems to genuinely believe, that North Korea has no disabled, and that the children of the "Korean race" are all born healthy, strong and intelligent.
Read more about this topic: Pyongyang (comics)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)