All Monsters Must Die: An Excursion to North Korea is a strange, discursive book. Originally published in Sweden in 2011, the book is ostensibly an account of Magnus Bärtås and Fredrik Ekman's tour of North Korea in 2008. However, the book turns out to be more of a companionable sprawl than a simple travelogue, weaving in chapters about the notorious abductions of South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee and director Shin Sang-ok, the making of a North Korean Godzilla rip-off film called Pulgasari, the devastating mid-'90s famine known to North Koreans as the "Arduous March," the strangely close relationship between the ruling Kim clan and the incredibly wealthy South Korean cult leader Pastor Moon Sun-myung, and much, much more.
The book benefits from the authors' distinctly Scandinavian perspective, in part because it diverges from the Cold War-era narrative that persists in the West. When writing about the Korean War, for example, the authors note that to many Koreans at the time, "the North seemed like the true Korea" and refer to the American bombing campaign in North Korea as an "inexorable, drawn-out war crime." The authors always return to their own heavily guided, carefully choreographed tour of the "Hermit Kingdom" before the many tangents become distracting.
While the authors write about their frustration over North Korea's impenetrability, they still manage to carve a few human moments out of the rigid experience. Whether musing about Kim Il-sung's cult of personality or relating a particularly North Korean response to food poisoning, Bärtås and Ekman are wonderfully entertaining and frequently insightful. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books