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Winter in Sokcho
As if Marguerite Duras wrote Convenience Store Woman - a beautiful, unexpected novel from a debut French Korean author
It’s winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The cold slows everything down. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North’s watchtowers. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape.
The two form an uneasy relationship. When she agrees to accompany him on trips to discover an ‘authentic’ Korea, they visit snowy mountaintops and dramatic waterfalls, and cross into North Korea. But he takes no interest in the Sokcho she knows – the gaudy neon lights, the scars of war, the fish market where her mother works. As she’s pulled into his vision and taken in by his drawings, she strikes upon a way to finally be seen.
An exquisitely-crafted debut, which won the Prix Robert Walser, Winter in Sokcho is a novel about shared identities and divided selves, vision and blindness, intimacy and alienation. Elisa Shua Duspain’s voice is distinctive and unmistakable.
It’s winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The cold slows everything down. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North’s watchtowers. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape.
The two form an uneasy relationship. When she agrees to accompany him on trips to discover an ‘authentic’ Korea, they visit snowy mountaintops and dramatic waterfalls, and cross into North Korea. But he takes no interest in the Sokcho she knows – the gaudy neon lights, the scars of war, the fish market where her mother works. As she’s pulled into his vision and taken in by his drawings, she strikes upon a way to finally be seen.
An exquisitely-crafted debut, which won the Prix Robert Walser, Winter in Sokcho is a novel about shared identities and divided selves, vision and blindness, intimacy and alienation. Elisa Shua Duspain’s voice is distinctive and unmistakable.
154 pages, Paperback
First published August 19, 2016
About the author
Elisa Shua Dusapin
7 books470 followersElisa Shua Dusapin was born in France in 1992 and raised in Paris, Seoul and Switzerland. Winter in Sokcho (Hiver à Sokcho) is her first novel. Published in 2016 to wide acclaim, it was awarded the Prix Robert Walser and the Prix Régine Desforges and has been translated into six languages.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 3,376 reviews
March 28, 2024
‘He needed me to help him see.’
‘Oozing Winter and fish, Sokcho waited,’ the unnamed narrator of Elisa Shua Dusapin’s haunting debut, Winter in Sokcho, tells us, ‘That was Sokcho. Always waiting. For tourists, boats, men, Spring.’ When a mysterious Frenchman shows up to stay during the winter, our narrator’s life is slowly thrown asunder by their slow-burn growing friendship as he asks her to show him the ‘authentic’ Sokcho. Like the town in winter, the whole novel reads like a breath held and waiting, with Aneesa Abbas Higgins translation (for which this won the 2021 National Book Awards for Translated Literature) lovingly rendering Dusapin’s prose in all it’s compulsive and eerie beauty. There is a deep undercurrent of ideas accruing inside this novel that exists like the dust on butterfly wings. It’s as if it subsists on atmosphere and tone alone, pulling you through its sparseness of narrative landscape and bleakness of winter off-season living like a frenetic fever dream. Yet still there is a denseness vibrating through themes of endless war, alienation and cultural identity that come alive in a dark dance of body-image issues, family dynamics, ghosts of colonialism and more. A moody yet gripping story of two strangers trying to truly see each other and themselves, Winter in Sokcho is an emotional noir of culture and identity adrift in the fogs of life.
(Sokcho Harbor, where much of the novel takes place)
This is a novel where not much happens but there is so much bursting beneath the surface. While it doesn’t add up to much, it is impressive in the way the individual scenes build a strong tension and stand strongly on their own imagery but also powerfully accruing with each added moment. Like Kerrand’s style of storytelling, it is ‘a story [that] evolved constantly, every drawing was as important as the next.’ This book rides a growing feeling like a tidal wave of overpowering dread. Dusapin can really execute atmosphere.
I'm quite a fan lately of moody little books set in off-season towns, such as That Time of Year or The Weak Spot, and this fits well with them. It may be due to living in a summer town myself and experiencing the stark difference of cold and quiet from the hectic summer days catering to tourists. As I write this we are coming up on the climax of our yearly Tulip festival and the town is overrun by visitors (during a pandemic, so add whatever emotional undercurrent to that as you will).
Loneliness and alienation permeate the novel like warm butter into every nook and cranny of a muffin. These are characters struggling with identity, and weighing out how much of self-perception is forged internally and how much is externally influenced. We have the narrator and her body dysmorphia struggles, the artist unsure where to lead his protagonist, a boyfriend caught up in modeling, a young woman recovering from plastic surgery, and a whole nation cut off from it’s upper counterpoint in an uneasy cease fire. The narrator has internal issues gaslit into her by those around her, constantly criticized by her mother over her physical appearance and lack of eating as well as her lack of a marriage even at a young age.
In Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, No Exit, there is a lack of mirror is Hell and characters can only see themselves reflected back through the impressions of other people. This is part of the torment, a Hell of self-examination where the self may be lost into the assessment of others, and the risk of adopting a bad faith persona. Dusapin delves into this territory as the narrator’s attraction to the French artist who comes to stay is centered in her desire to be seen by him. ‘He looked through me,” she observes upon their first encounter, ‘without seeing me.” While she spends much of the novel touristing him about Sokcho in his quest for an ‘authentic’ South Korea, she initially tries to see herself and her half-French heritage in him. She wants him to look at her in a way that is ‘showing me my unfamiliar self, that other part of me, over there, on the other side of the world. I wanted more of it. I wanted to live through his ink, to bathe in it.’ Their awkwardly Oedipal friendship—he is old enough to be the French father who skipped out on her—grows as she tries to understand the Frenchness in him, but is pushed away by his refusal to actually see the Koreanness in her.
Wanting to be seen as herself becomes her aim later in the novel contrary to her other drive to disappear. These conflicting struggles with a sense of self are reflective of a larger political conflict. The scar on her leg serves as an effective, complex metaphor of self-image struggles and the DMZ dividing North and South Korea. Additionally, her French and Korean identities won’t quite combine in her being, feeling both a part and alienated from both. She studied French arts in college but is cold towards Kerrand’s descriptions of Normandy. She lives in Korea but cannot seem to satisfactorily prepare traditional food.
Yan Kerrand has his own share of interpersonal struggles, a man who strikes the narrator as ‘as being very much alone.’ He is in Sokcho looking for inspiration for the final volume of his graphic novel series. The series is described to us by the narrator as such:‘’A different location for each book, a voyage in monochrome ink wash. No dialogue, very few words. A lone figure. With a striking resemblance to the author’ that Kerrand says is fairly inspired by Corto Maltese but changed to ‘ a globe-trotting archaeologist’ instead of a sailor. ‘He needs a story that never ends,’ he tells the narrator, ‘a story that’s all-encompassing. A fable. A complete perfect fable.’ All his art is a strive for perfection, but one he can never grasp and is always fearing once he releases his stories to the readers they will not fully grasp what he wanted to convey. He fears the mirror self. He cannot create women characters, it seems, because he feels he must understand them enough to draw in a singular line. Hiis flighty mention of having been married and the late-night drawings of ever-changing women the narrator witnesses hints at something buried deep within him, haunting him.
In his search of an authentic Korea, he misses the real Korea for the tourist version. He only goes to museums and seems to dislike being out amongst people on the streets to breathe in the city, he doesn’t eat the local cuisine and opts for Dunkin Donuts or westernized versions instead (he even dismisses all of Asian noodle recipes as inferior to Italians). He dislikes Sokcho, but the narrator seems to think he cannot ever understand it.
Much of this is indicative to a colonialist mindset that may hold only subconsciously. The desire to Westernize Korea in order to accept it, to consume it on his term. While the narrator has her own food-related struggles, Kerrand seems to display pica when he tears off and eats his art paper. This also seems to be him trying to consume what he can’t grasp, a reflection of France colonizing Asian countries.
He also does not seem to value the differences between France and Korea, and this troubles the narrator. While walking alone Korean beaches fenced in by barbed wire with North Korean gun turrets visible on the horizon, he reflects on the beaches of Normandy as still bearing ‘scars from the war’ and that ‘you’ll still find bones and blood in the sand.’ The narrator recoils at this, reminding him it was ‘a war that finished a long time ago’ and not a constant threat like they experience in South Korea. She rejects his assertion that they are the same.
This endless limbo is at the heart of the novel’s atmosphere. The balance between life and death hangs over everything, such as the mother’s liscenced job to extract the toxins from seafood to be eaten. The narrator, caught up in the slow churning whirlwind with Kerrand, begins slicing portions of her own life out, but with her clumsiness with a knife that is well established throughout the book, is she actually extracting toxins or self-mutilating? Everything crashes into an enigmatic but satisfactory conclusion that looks head on into the nature of art and being seen.
Now a word on the translation, which is great and now I want to read anything Aneesa Abbas Higgins translates. I really love Open Letter Books. I love a non-profit small press, particularly one that focuses their attention on translation. While publishers are doing the work and slowly moving towards inclusivity here in the US--YA publishers often leading the charge--which is wonderful. It is great that these new voices are being heard and we should also be looking outside our own borders and not only center American or Western perspectives. Translation can help give us that. A study has shown that only 3% of books published in the US are translated works (compare that to, say, Italy where over 50% are translations). Of that 3%, only about 35% are by women. So I enjoy publishers like this who are doing the work, finding really great titles and presenting them in really nice editions like this one (I swear I am in no way affiliated or receiving compensation for writing this, I just think this publisher is cool). So basically I like translators and am very interested in their art. Aneesa Abbas Higgins delivers a feast of tone and atmosphere here in her treatment of Dusapin’s original French. In conversation with the translator and Literary Field Kaleidoscope, she worked closely with Dusapin asking on the ideas underlying the images’ and ‘to clarify if I had understood them.’ Higgins states that ‘English needs to spell out things a bit more than French does’ and for a novel that thrives in the intangible, this is a key aspect to perfect for full effect.
Winter in Sokcho is a brooding novel that lumbers slowly, picking up in intensity. There is so much atmosphere one might feel like swimming through a fog, and it sustains the novel beautifully. So many quiet tribulations form a cacophonous choir muffled beneath of surface but their tremors are felt in every sentence, bubbling out of every scene. Dusapin has a marvelous control over her tone and craft, and this is an enviable debut.
4.25/5
(Art by Jiin Choi)
‘Oozing Winter and fish, Sokcho waited,’ the unnamed narrator of Elisa Shua Dusapin’s haunting debut, Winter in Sokcho, tells us, ‘That was Sokcho. Always waiting. For tourists, boats, men, Spring.’ When a mysterious Frenchman shows up to stay during the winter, our narrator’s life is slowly thrown asunder by their slow-burn growing friendship as he asks her to show him the ‘authentic’ Sokcho. Like the town in winter, the whole novel reads like a breath held and waiting, with Aneesa Abbas Higgins translation (for which this won the 2021 National Book Awards for Translated Literature) lovingly rendering Dusapin’s prose in all it’s compulsive and eerie beauty. There is a deep undercurrent of ideas accruing inside this novel that exists like the dust on butterfly wings. It’s as if it subsists on atmosphere and tone alone, pulling you through its sparseness of narrative landscape and bleakness of winter off-season living like a frenetic fever dream. Yet still there is a denseness vibrating through themes of endless war, alienation and cultural identity that come alive in a dark dance of body-image issues, family dynamics, ghosts of colonialism and more. A moody yet gripping story of two strangers trying to truly see each other and themselves, Winter in Sokcho is an emotional noir of culture and identity adrift in the fogs of life.
(Sokcho Harbor, where much of the novel takes place)
This is a novel where not much happens but there is so much bursting beneath the surface. While it doesn’t add up to much, it is impressive in the way the individual scenes build a strong tension and stand strongly on their own imagery but also powerfully accruing with each added moment. Like Kerrand’s style of storytelling, it is ‘a story [that] evolved constantly, every drawing was as important as the next.’ This book rides a growing feeling like a tidal wave of overpowering dread. Dusapin can really execute atmosphere.
I'm quite a fan lately of moody little books set in off-season towns, such as That Time of Year or The Weak Spot, and this fits well with them. It may be due to living in a summer town myself and experiencing the stark difference of cold and quiet from the hectic summer days catering to tourists. As I write this we are coming up on the climax of our yearly Tulip festival and the town is overrun by visitors (during a pandemic, so add whatever emotional undercurrent to that as you will).
Loneliness and alienation permeate the novel like warm butter into every nook and cranny of a muffin. These are characters struggling with identity, and weighing out how much of self-perception is forged internally and how much is externally influenced. We have the narrator and her body dysmorphia struggles, the artist unsure where to lead his protagonist, a boyfriend caught up in modeling, a young woman recovering from plastic surgery, and a whole nation cut off from it’s upper counterpoint in an uneasy cease fire. The narrator has internal issues gaslit into her by those around her, constantly criticized by her mother over her physical appearance and lack of eating as well as her lack of a marriage even at a young age.
In Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, No Exit, there is a lack of mirror is Hell and characters can only see themselves reflected back through the impressions of other people. This is part of the torment, a Hell of self-examination where the self may be lost into the assessment of others, and the risk of adopting a bad faith persona. Dusapin delves into this territory as the narrator’s attraction to the French artist who comes to stay is centered in her desire to be seen by him. ‘He looked through me,” she observes upon their first encounter, ‘without seeing me.” While she spends much of the novel touristing him about Sokcho in his quest for an ‘authentic’ South Korea, she initially tries to see herself and her half-French heritage in him. She wants him to look at her in a way that is ‘showing me my unfamiliar self, that other part of me, over there, on the other side of the world. I wanted more of it. I wanted to live through his ink, to bathe in it.’ Their awkwardly Oedipal friendship—he is old enough to be the French father who skipped out on her—grows as she tries to understand the Frenchness in him, but is pushed away by his refusal to actually see the Koreanness in her.
’I didn’t want to be his eyes on my world. I wanted to be seen. I wanted him to see me with his own eyes. I wanted him to draw me.
Wanting to be seen as herself becomes her aim later in the novel contrary to her other drive to disappear. These conflicting struggles with a sense of self are reflective of a larger political conflict. The scar on her leg serves as an effective, complex metaphor of self-image struggles and the DMZ dividing North and South Korea. Additionally, her French and Korean identities won’t quite combine in her being, feeling both a part and alienated from both. She studied French arts in college but is cold towards Kerrand’s descriptions of Normandy. She lives in Korea but cannot seem to satisfactorily prepare traditional food.
Yan Kerrand has his own share of interpersonal struggles, a man who strikes the narrator as ‘as being very much alone.’ He is in Sokcho looking for inspiration for the final volume of his graphic novel series. The series is described to us by the narrator as such:‘’A different location for each book, a voyage in monochrome ink wash. No dialogue, very few words. A lone figure. With a striking resemblance to the author’ that Kerrand says is fairly inspired by Corto Maltese but changed to ‘ a globe-trotting archaeologist’ instead of a sailor. ‘He needs a story that never ends,’ he tells the narrator, ‘a story that’s all-encompassing. A fable. A complete perfect fable.’ All his art is a strive for perfection, but one he can never grasp and is always fearing once he releases his stories to the readers they will not fully grasp what he wanted to convey. He fears the mirror self. He cannot create women characters, it seems, because he feels he must understand them enough to draw in a singular line. Hiis flighty mention of having been married and the late-night drawings of ever-changing women the narrator witnesses hints at something buried deep within him, haunting him.
In his search of an authentic Korea, he misses the real Korea for the tourist version. He only goes to museums and seems to dislike being out amongst people on the streets to breathe in the city, he doesn’t eat the local cuisine and opts for Dunkin Donuts or westernized versions instead (he even dismisses all of Asian noodle recipes as inferior to Italians). He dislikes Sokcho, but the narrator seems to think he cannot ever understand it.
‘He'd never understand what Sokcho was like. You had to be born here, live through the winters. The smells, the octopus. The isolation.’
Much of this is indicative to a colonialist mindset that may hold only subconsciously. The desire to Westernize Korea in order to accept it, to consume it on his term. While the narrator has her own food-related struggles, Kerrand seems to display pica when he tears off and eats his art paper. This also seems to be him trying to consume what he can’t grasp, a reflection of France colonizing Asian countries.
He also does not seem to value the differences between France and Korea, and this troubles the narrator. While walking alone Korean beaches fenced in by barbed wire with North Korean gun turrets visible on the horizon, he reflects on the beaches of Normandy as still bearing ‘scars from the war’ and that ‘you’ll still find bones and blood in the sand.’ The narrator recoils at this, reminding him it was ‘a war that finished a long time ago’ and not a constant threat like they experience in South Korea. She rejects his assertion that they are the same.
’What I mean is you may have had your wars...but that’s all in the past. Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real. They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it’s all fake, we’re on a knife-edge, it could all give way any moment. We’re living in limbo. In a winter that never ends.’
This endless limbo is at the heart of the novel’s atmosphere. The balance between life and death hangs over everything, such as the mother’s liscenced job to extract the toxins from seafood to be eaten. The narrator, caught up in the slow churning whirlwind with Kerrand, begins slicing portions of her own life out, but with her clumsiness with a knife that is well established throughout the book, is she actually extracting toxins or self-mutilating? Everything crashes into an enigmatic but satisfactory conclusion that looks head on into the nature of art and being seen.
Now a word on the translation, which is great and now I want to read anything Aneesa Abbas Higgins translates. I really love Open Letter Books. I love a non-profit small press, particularly one that focuses their attention on translation. While publishers are doing the work and slowly moving towards inclusivity here in the US--YA publishers often leading the charge--which is wonderful. It is great that these new voices are being heard and we should also be looking outside our own borders and not only center American or Western perspectives. Translation can help give us that. A study has shown that only 3% of books published in the US are translated works (compare that to, say, Italy where over 50% are translations). Of that 3%, only about 35% are by women. So I enjoy publishers like this who are doing the work, finding really great titles and presenting them in really nice editions like this one (I swear I am in no way affiliated or receiving compensation for writing this, I just think this publisher is cool). So basically I like translators and am very interested in their art. Aneesa Abbas Higgins delivers a feast of tone and atmosphere here in her treatment of Dusapin’s original French. In conversation with the translator and Literary Field Kaleidoscope, she worked closely with Dusapin asking on the ideas underlying the images’ and ‘to clarify if I had understood them.’ Higgins states that ‘English needs to spell out things a bit more than French does’ and for a novel that thrives in the intangible, this is a key aspect to perfect for full effect.
Winter in Sokcho is a brooding novel that lumbers slowly, picking up in intensity. There is so much atmosphere one might feel like swimming through a fog, and it sustains the novel beautifully. So many quiet tribulations form a cacophonous choir muffled beneath of surface but their tremors are felt in every sentence, bubbling out of every scene. Dusapin has a marvelous control over her tone and craft, and this is an enviable debut.
4.25/5
(Art by Jiin Choi)
June 4, 2023
“For five hundred won, you could gaze at North Korea. I slid a coin in the slot. It was so cold our eyelids stuck to the metal frames. To the right, the ocean. To the left, a wall of mountains. Ahead of us, fog. Not much of a view, but what could you expect with this weather?”
It's winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between North and South Korea. During these winter months when it is bitterly cold and tourists rarely visit, a young French Korean woman goes about her days working and maintaining a guest house and spending time with her mother. Unexpectedly, an enigmatic French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape arrives at the guest house.
I love books that build atmosphere. That put you in a place viscerally. Winter in Sokcho places you in the South Korean city and gives you the bleak, frigid environment as a backdrop to this delicate relationship story.
A book where not a whole lot happens but you know you will remember it for a long time, a book about identities and feeling like you don't belong. For such a short book, it really packs in important themes and does them very well. I felt like I was transported to Sokcho while reading, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was looking at these people's lives through a keyhole. Their intimate moments and their private thoughts.
"He had no right to leave. To leave with his story of Sokcho. To put it on display halfway across the world. He had no right to abandon me, to leave me here, with my own story withering on the rocks.”
This book is soft and thoughtful but with the occasional tug of unhappiness, an undercurrent of discord surrounding love, family, and the feeling of being tied to a place. Threads of alienation, identity and intimacy make this book so sadly beautiful. It is melancholic, atmospheric, simple, but powerful.
Highly Recommend
“Why didn't he breathe life into her, bring this haunting creature to life so I could rip her to shreds?”
4.5
It's winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between North and South Korea. During these winter months when it is bitterly cold and tourists rarely visit, a young French Korean woman goes about her days working and maintaining a guest house and spending time with her mother. Unexpectedly, an enigmatic French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape arrives at the guest house.
I love books that build atmosphere. That put you in a place viscerally. Winter in Sokcho places you in the South Korean city and gives you the bleak, frigid environment as a backdrop to this delicate relationship story.
A book where not a whole lot happens but you know you will remember it for a long time, a book about identities and feeling like you don't belong. For such a short book, it really packs in important themes and does them very well. I felt like I was transported to Sokcho while reading, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was looking at these people's lives through a keyhole. Their intimate moments and their private thoughts.
"He had no right to leave. To leave with his story of Sokcho. To put it on display halfway across the world. He had no right to abandon me, to leave me here, with my own story withering on the rocks.”
This book is soft and thoughtful but with the occasional tug of unhappiness, an undercurrent of discord surrounding love, family, and the feeling of being tied to a place. Threads of alienation, identity and intimacy make this book so sadly beautiful. It is melancholic, atmospheric, simple, but powerful.
Highly Recommend
“Why didn't he breathe life into her, bring this haunting creature to life so I could rip her to shreds?”
4.5
April 25, 2022
Once, when I was in college, I took a class called Introduction to Magazine Writing, because I’d taken another class with the professor and liked it and because I needed to fulfill some requirement or other in order to get into a class I really wanted.
We had to write a travel piece in the middle of February, so I trekked to the beach town I’d spent my childhood summers in and wrote a couple of melancholy pages about snow on sand.
I love off seasons, and so I loved this book.
There is something so intrinsically interesting about an off-season, a place without its essence, when it's more and less itself. This book takes place in Sokcho, a colorful city teeming with tourists in the warm months and desolate and unwelcoming to its natives in the cold.
We follow our unnamed protagonist, who works and lives in a motel, a monument to the differences between the town she's always known as months pass.
This is a book about her, her yearning and wistfulness, she who still manages to be above all steady and rational. The prose is clear and lovely, the setting fascinating, and themes of home and motherhood and beauty standards are woven in effortlessly.
In other words: It's good!
Bottom line: Every once in a while I read a book so well-done I can't help but be pretentious. I don't have to clarify this is one of those times.
---------------
pre-review
another win for judging books by their covers and awards.
review to come / 4 stars
---------------
currently-reading updates
i have made a mental note to read this book about 97 times and forgotten every time. so this time i'm just going to read it
We had to write a travel piece in the middle of February, so I trekked to the beach town I’d spent my childhood summers in and wrote a couple of melancholy pages about snow on sand.
I love off seasons, and so I loved this book.
There is something so intrinsically interesting about an off-season, a place without its essence, when it's more and less itself. This book takes place in Sokcho, a colorful city teeming with tourists in the warm months and desolate and unwelcoming to its natives in the cold.
We follow our unnamed protagonist, who works and lives in a motel, a monument to the differences between the town she's always known as months pass.
This is a book about her, her yearning and wistfulness, she who still manages to be above all steady and rational. The prose is clear and lovely, the setting fascinating, and themes of home and motherhood and beauty standards are woven in effortlessly.
In other words: It's good!
Bottom line: Every once in a while I read a book so well-done I can't help but be pretentious. I don't have to clarify this is one of those times.
---------------
pre-review
another win for judging books by their covers and awards.
review to come / 4 stars
---------------
currently-reading updates
i have made a mental note to read this book about 97 times and forgotten every time. so this time i'm just going to read it
December 22, 2022
Oozing winter and fish, Sokcho waited.
That was Sokcho, always waiting, for tourists, boats, men, spring.
We are living in limbo. In a winter that never ends.
What matters is the light. It shapes what you see.
Looking again, I realised that I didn't see the ink. All I saw was the white space between the lines, the light absorbed by the paper, the snow bursting off the page, real enough to touch. Like a Chinese ideogram.
I would walk out to the pagoda at the end of the jetty, skin clammy from the stench of the sea spray that left salt on the cheeks, a taste of iron on the tongue, and soon, the thousands of lights would start to twinkle and the fishermen would cast off from shore and make their way out to sea with their light traps, a slow, stately procession, the Milky Way of the seas.
A poetic, ambient and unsettling novel which intruigingly blends lyrical elegance and visceral rawness, claustrophia and desolation, bodily issues and intimacy, brutality and tenderness, French and Korean identity and culture.
(artwork by Brooks Shane Salzwedel)
That was Sokcho, always waiting, for tourists, boats, men, spring.
We are living in limbo. In a winter that never ends.
What matters is the light. It shapes what you see.
Looking again, I realised that I didn't see the ink. All I saw was the white space between the lines, the light absorbed by the paper, the snow bursting off the page, real enough to touch. Like a Chinese ideogram.
I would walk out to the pagoda at the end of the jetty, skin clammy from the stench of the sea spray that left salt on the cheeks, a taste of iron on the tongue, and soon, the thousands of lights would start to twinkle and the fishermen would cast off from shore and make their way out to sea with their light traps, a slow, stately procession, the Milky Way of the seas.
A poetic, ambient and unsettling novel which intruigingly blends lyrical elegance and visceral rawness, claustrophia and desolation, bodily issues and intimacy, brutality and tenderness, French and Korean identity and culture.
(artwork by Brooks Shane Salzwedel)
January 6, 2024
"We live in a limbo. In a winter that never ends"
Winter in Sokcho is a literary noir in recent memory, set in Sokcho; a city close to South Korea's impenetrable northern counterpart. It tells the story of an anguished young woman who feels the hint of a flame with a foreigner who came to stay at the guesthouse she was working at.
I honestly don't know what to make of this book or if I truly understand its purpose. I believe I was expecting a bit more of a heavy discussion on social issues or something of a deeper meaning — which is probably not fair since it doesn't have to be all that, and it's not like this book doesn't have any deeper meaning. It's just that it was told in a simple way where not much thing really happened.
However, I like that it was still an easy read and not as dry as other translated books I came across. The writing style was atmospheric and I also appreciate how the story revolves around Sokcho as a place — there's something very charming about a beach town in winter where everyone is cooped up, at the same time how gently the squandered opportunities were handled there.
Other than that, couldn't say I'm a big fan of the work. This book has no chapter, but the author always ends the story in the most abrupt and irrelevant way in between every division. The characters and the plot as a whole are lackluster; it completely missed me. I can understand the narrator objectively, but I don't feel her at all. Also, didn't expect a bit of a closed-door explicit content offered in this book.
Reading this feels like you're in a void because it doesn't lead you in any way to perceive the world. Nonetheless, this was an okay read.
March 31, 2022
2021 Winner of the National Book Award -- Translated Literature
I'm sitting here very much at a loss for words about how to describe the exquisite reading experience that is this book. I keep trying to write something cogent and then deleting what I've written, and starting over. I'm trying and failing to describe why such a small story could deliver such a revelatory and emotional gut-punch.
The author creates a narrator who has very little regard for herself, but who is never sorry for herself. She lives in a world where nothing ever changes, and yet she describes her world so vividly that it feels charged with beauty and possibility. She so rarely judges those around her, or allows herself to think largely, that when she does speak her mind, it's a revelation.
I've had the privilege of spending time with a character who has found a way to live an intentional and meaningful life, however limited her life is by her circumstances. The relentless torrent of detail--colors, smells, temperature--make the argument on the page that even simple, mundane acts can be filled with intention and beauty.
I'm sitting here very much at a loss for words about how to describe the exquisite reading experience that is this book. I keep trying to write something cogent and then deleting what I've written, and starting over. I'm trying and failing to describe why such a small story could deliver such a revelatory and emotional gut-punch.
The author creates a narrator who has very little regard for herself, but who is never sorry for herself. She lives in a world where nothing ever changes, and yet she describes her world so vividly that it feels charged with beauty and possibility. She so rarely judges those around her, or allows herself to think largely, that when she does speak her mind, it's a revelation.
I've had the privilege of spending time with a character who has found a way to live an intentional and meaningful life, however limited her life is by her circumstances. The relentless torrent of detail--colors, smells, temperature--make the argument on the page that even simple, mundane acts can be filled with intention and beauty.
April 14, 2024
Winner of translated fiction National Book Award 2021
A wistful story set in a Korean seaside resort, full of seafood, unrealistic beauty standards and some unrequited romance
’Sometimes I think I’ll never be able to convey what I really want to say.’
I thought for a moment.
‘Maybe it’s better that way.’
This National Book Award shortlist nominee for fiction is a bit too subtle for me and without enough propulsive aspects to really win me over.
We follow a young woman who works in Sokcho, a seaside resort quite close to the demilitarised zone and the North-Korean border. She is of mixed race, with a French father who is out of the picture, and an ageing mother who fishes and is a great cook of seafood, including the poisonous fugu fish:
I watched her work. She never gave me permission to handle fugu.
‘Do you like your job?’
‘Why?’ she asked
While working in a kind of decrepit guesthouse over winter a French graphic novelist visits. Meanwhile the relation of the protagonist with her boyfriend turned model in Seoul turns sour.
Problems with eating (and a lot of enticing seafood depictions), beauty standards and plastic surgery are rampant. The guesthouse is used as a recuperation place for a girl who underwent surgery and can only "eat" liquids for over two weeks. Also the narrator is constantly and from multiple sides "encouraged" to do surgery to be able to get a better job in Seoul.
Despite multiple trips and dinner dates the relation with the Frenchman doesn’t go anywhere and there seems a general feeling of paralysation, maybe a metaphor for winter or the still ongoing war with the northern neighbour.
A well written book but lacking in emotional punch for me.
A wistful story set in a Korean seaside resort, full of seafood, unrealistic beauty standards and some unrequited romance
’Sometimes I think I’ll never be able to convey what I really want to say.’
I thought for a moment.
‘Maybe it’s better that way.’
This National Book Award shortlist nominee for fiction is a bit too subtle for me and without enough propulsive aspects to really win me over.
We follow a young woman who works in Sokcho, a seaside resort quite close to the demilitarised zone and the North-Korean border. She is of mixed race, with a French father who is out of the picture, and an ageing mother who fishes and is a great cook of seafood, including the poisonous fugu fish:
I watched her work. She never gave me permission to handle fugu.
‘Do you like your job?’
‘Why?’ she asked
While working in a kind of decrepit guesthouse over winter a French graphic novelist visits. Meanwhile the relation of the protagonist with her boyfriend turned model in Seoul turns sour.
Problems with eating (and a lot of enticing seafood depictions), beauty standards and plastic surgery are rampant. The guesthouse is used as a recuperation place for a girl who underwent surgery and can only "eat" liquids for over two weeks. Also the narrator is constantly and from multiple sides "encouraged" to do surgery to be able to get a better job in Seoul.
Despite multiple trips and dinner dates the relation with the Frenchman doesn’t go anywhere and there seems a general feeling of paralysation, maybe a metaphor for winter or the still ongoing war with the northern neighbour.
A well written book but lacking in emotional punch for me.
March 2, 2024
Winner of the National Book Award for Translated Literature
Oozing Winter and fish, Sokcho waited.
That was Sokcho. Always waiting. For tourists, boats, men, Spring.
Winter in Sokcho has been translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins from the French-language original Hiver à Sokcho by Élisa Shua Dusapin. The 소설 on the cover a neat touch - the Korean word for novel, and mirroring the way the French original, as many novels there, adds 'Roman' to the title.
The novel is set in the eponymous East Sea coastal city, 속초시, in the north-east of South Korea, close to the beautiful Seoraksan (설악산 ) national park and to the north of Pyeongchang (평창군) venue for the 2018 Winter Olympics, but also close to the DMZ and the North Korean border, its beaches protected with barbed wire.
The novel's narrator is a 24 year old young woman, Sokcho-born. Her mother, who sells and cooks seafood, is still in the area, but my French origins were still a source of gossip even though it was twenty-three years since my father had seduced my mother and vanished without a trace. The narrator went on to study French and Korean at university in Seoul, her one period of life spent outside of Sokcho, before returning to be with her mother, although when asked why she studied French replies so I could speak a language my mother wouldn’t understand.
She is working in a run-down guest house, largely empty given the low season, when a traveller, a cartoonist, arrives from France.
He put his suitcase down at my feet and took off his knitted cap. Western face. Dark eyes. Hair combed to one side. He looked straight through me, without seeing me. With an air of lassitude, he asked me in English if he could stay for a few days while he looked around for something else. I gave him a registration form. He handed me his passport so I could fill in the form for him. Yan Kerrand, 1968, from Granville. A Frenchman. He seemed younger than in the photo, his cheeks less hollow. I held out my pencil for him to sign and he took a pen from his coat. While I was booking him in, he pulled off his gloves, placed them on the counter, scrutinised the dust, the cat figurine on the wall above the computer. I felt compelled, for the first time, to make excuses for myself. I wasn’t responsible for the run-down state of this place. I’d only been working there a month.
Sa valise à mes pieds, il a retiré son bonnet. Visage occidental. Yeux sombres. Cheveux peignés sur le côté. Son regard m’a traversée sans me voir. L’air ennuyé, il a demandé en anglais s’il pouvait rester quelques jours, le temps de trouver autre chose. Je lui ai donné un formulaire. Il m’a tendu son passeport pour que je le remplisse moi-même. Yan Kerrand, 1968, de Granville. Un Français. Il avait l’air plus jeune sur la photo, le visage moins creux. Je lui ai désigné mon crayon pour qu’il signe, il a sorti une plume de son manteau. Pendant que je l’enregistrais, il a retiré ses gants, les a posés sur le comptoir, a détaillé la poussière, la statuette de chat fixée au-dessus de l’ordinateur. Pour la première fois je ressentais le besoin de me justifier. Je n’étais pas responsable de la décrépitude de cet endroit. J’y travaillais depuis un mois seulement.
The relationship between the two is at once distant but intense. She doesn't initially admit her French origins, or language skills, speaking to him instead in her imperfect English. He refuses the Korean meals she cooks for him, despite having taken half-board surviving on Dunkin' Donuts and cheesecake from Paris Baguette (she is more of a Choco Pie fan). The sensousness underlying her otherwise detached narration is often represented by the taste and smell of the fish market and of the food she, and her mother (the only licenced fugu-chef in the area) prepares:
The octopus were tiny, ten or so to a handful. I sorted through them, browned them with shallots, soy sauce, sugar, and diluted bean paste. I reduced the heat to stop them getting too dry. When the sauce was thickened, I added some sesame and tteok, slices of small sticky rice balls. Then I started to chop the carrots. Reflected in the blade of the knife, their grooved surface blended weirdly with the flesh of my fingers.
Les poulpes étaient minuscules. Je pouvais en prendre une dizaine par poignée. Je les ai triés, puis caramélisés avec des échalotes, de la sauce soja, du sucre et de la pâte de piment diluée dans de l’eau. J’ai réduit le gaz pour qu’ils ne s’assèchent pas. Une fois la sauce suffisamment condensée, j’ai ajouté du sésame et la pâte de riz gluant, le tteok, en rondelles de la taille d’un pouce. Je me suis mise à couper des carottes. Dans leur reflet sur la lame, les rainures végétales se confondaient curieusement avec la chair de mes doigts.
Sokcho is, in my experience of visiting, in a beautiful part of the world, but not the area where the boarding house is based, and not during low season:
He’d never understand what Sokcho was like. You had to be born here, live through the winters. The smells, the octopus. The isolation.
He here being Kerrand, who is a published author of graphic novels, his main character a globe-trotting archaeologist. A different location for each book, a voyage in monochrome ink wash. No dialogue, very few words. A lone figure. With a striking resemblance to the author, in the tradition of Corto Maltese (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corto_M...). Kerrand is trying to write the last volume of the series, searching for a way to bring his narration to the end, perhaps one where his character, a loner, finds the woman he's actually always been seeking. In one beautifully portrayed scene the narrator is in the room next door while Kerrand, a perfectionist, draws:
On the other side of the wall, the hand moved slowly. A stately dance, dead leaves in the wind. No violence in the sound. Sadness. Melancholy. The woman uncoiling in the palm of his hand, winding herself around his fingers, lips brushing the paper. All night long. I tried to block out the sound, pressing at my cheeks to cover my ears. All night until the early hours, when the pen finally fell silent and I went to sleep, exhausted.
Which illustrates the distinctive language of the novel, expertly rendered into English in the translator's version, as she explains in a fascinating note in Asymptote Journal (https://www.asymptotejournal.com/spec...)
Highly recommended, 5 stars for me as this was a truly wonderful read.
Oozing Winter and fish, Sokcho waited.
That was Sokcho. Always waiting. For tourists, boats, men, Spring.
Winter in Sokcho has been translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins from the French-language original Hiver à Sokcho by Élisa Shua Dusapin. The 소설 on the cover a neat touch - the Korean word for novel, and mirroring the way the French original, as many novels there, adds 'Roman' to the title.
The novel is set in the eponymous East Sea coastal city, 속초시, in the north-east of South Korea, close to the beautiful Seoraksan (설악산 ) national park and to the north of Pyeongchang (평창군) venue for the 2018 Winter Olympics, but also close to the DMZ and the North Korean border, its beaches protected with barbed wire.
The novel's narrator is a 24 year old young woman, Sokcho-born. Her mother, who sells and cooks seafood, is still in the area, but my French origins were still a source of gossip even though it was twenty-three years since my father had seduced my mother and vanished without a trace. The narrator went on to study French and Korean at university in Seoul, her one period of life spent outside of Sokcho, before returning to be with her mother, although when asked why she studied French replies so I could speak a language my mother wouldn’t understand.
She is working in a run-down guest house, largely empty given the low season, when a traveller, a cartoonist, arrives from France.
He put his suitcase down at my feet and took off his knitted cap. Western face. Dark eyes. Hair combed to one side. He looked straight through me, without seeing me. With an air of lassitude, he asked me in English if he could stay for a few days while he looked around for something else. I gave him a registration form. He handed me his passport so I could fill in the form for him. Yan Kerrand, 1968, from Granville. A Frenchman. He seemed younger than in the photo, his cheeks less hollow. I held out my pencil for him to sign and he took a pen from his coat. While I was booking him in, he pulled off his gloves, placed them on the counter, scrutinised the dust, the cat figurine on the wall above the computer. I felt compelled, for the first time, to make excuses for myself. I wasn’t responsible for the run-down state of this place. I’d only been working there a month.
Sa valise à mes pieds, il a retiré son bonnet. Visage occidental. Yeux sombres. Cheveux peignés sur le côté. Son regard m’a traversée sans me voir. L’air ennuyé, il a demandé en anglais s’il pouvait rester quelques jours, le temps de trouver autre chose. Je lui ai donné un formulaire. Il m’a tendu son passeport pour que je le remplisse moi-même. Yan Kerrand, 1968, de Granville. Un Français. Il avait l’air plus jeune sur la photo, le visage moins creux. Je lui ai désigné mon crayon pour qu’il signe, il a sorti une plume de son manteau. Pendant que je l’enregistrais, il a retiré ses gants, les a posés sur le comptoir, a détaillé la poussière, la statuette de chat fixée au-dessus de l’ordinateur. Pour la première fois je ressentais le besoin de me justifier. Je n’étais pas responsable de la décrépitude de cet endroit. J’y travaillais depuis un mois seulement.
The relationship between the two is at once distant but intense. She doesn't initially admit her French origins, or language skills, speaking to him instead in her imperfect English. He refuses the Korean meals she cooks for him, despite having taken half-board surviving on Dunkin' Donuts and cheesecake from Paris Baguette (she is more of a Choco Pie fan). The sensousness underlying her otherwise detached narration is often represented by the taste and smell of the fish market and of the food she, and her mother (the only licenced fugu-chef in the area) prepares:
The octopus were tiny, ten or so to a handful. I sorted through them, browned them with shallots, soy sauce, sugar, and diluted bean paste. I reduced the heat to stop them getting too dry. When the sauce was thickened, I added some sesame and tteok, slices of small sticky rice balls. Then I started to chop the carrots. Reflected in the blade of the knife, their grooved surface blended weirdly with the flesh of my fingers.
Les poulpes étaient minuscules. Je pouvais en prendre une dizaine par poignée. Je les ai triés, puis caramélisés avec des échalotes, de la sauce soja, du sucre et de la pâte de piment diluée dans de l’eau. J’ai réduit le gaz pour qu’ils ne s’assèchent pas. Une fois la sauce suffisamment condensée, j’ai ajouté du sésame et la pâte de riz gluant, le tteok, en rondelles de la taille d’un pouce. Je me suis mise à couper des carottes. Dans leur reflet sur la lame, les rainures végétales se confondaient curieusement avec la chair de mes doigts.
Sokcho is, in my experience of visiting, in a beautiful part of the world, but not the area where the boarding house is based, and not during low season:
He’d never understand what Sokcho was like. You had to be born here, live through the winters. The smells, the octopus. The isolation.
He here being Kerrand, who is a published author of graphic novels, his main character a globe-trotting archaeologist. A different location for each book, a voyage in monochrome ink wash. No dialogue, very few words. A lone figure. With a striking resemblance to the author, in the tradition of Corto Maltese (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corto_M...). Kerrand is trying to write the last volume of the series, searching for a way to bring his narration to the end, perhaps one where his character, a loner, finds the woman he's actually always been seeking. In one beautifully portrayed scene the narrator is in the room next door while Kerrand, a perfectionist, draws:
On the other side of the wall, the hand moved slowly. A stately dance, dead leaves in the wind. No violence in the sound. Sadness. Melancholy. The woman uncoiling in the palm of his hand, winding herself around his fingers, lips brushing the paper. All night long. I tried to block out the sound, pressing at my cheeks to cover my ears. All night until the early hours, when the pen finally fell silent and I went to sleep, exhausted.
Which illustrates the distinctive language of the novel, expertly rendered into English in the translator's version, as she explains in a fascinating note in Asymptote Journal (https://www.asymptotejournal.com/spec...)
Elisa Shua Dusapin’s language is spare, elegant, and richly evocative. The novel is full of the sights, sounds, and smells of this windswept seaside town. Food is a constant presence and fish are everywhere. Her voice is cool and distant, her words deftly chosen to convey intimacy, violence, sensuality, and alienation. The challenge, and the pleasure, of bringing her voice into English lies in retaining that spare elegance without allowing the text to seem flat. The language has to create striking visual imagery but the words themselves must remain unobtrusive. It’s easy to be tempted into using too many words when translating since it’s usually impossible to find an exact equivalent for a key word. Connotations, poetic resonances, cultural associations, all of these can be stubbornly resistant to translation. Dusapin’s prose requires a combination of flexibility and discipline on the part of the translator. All the excess must be trimmed and only the essence allowed to appear on the pageAnd the author brings the story to a satisfyingly enigmatic close.
Highly recommended, 5 stars for me as this was a truly wonderful read.
October 28, 2024
3.5!
the meat of this story exists between the lines; dusapin’s writing creates for a hazy, atmospheric read, but it’s everything unsaid that elevates it and gives it depth. i think most people, especially myself, would benefit from a reread, catching all the details and making connections they might've missed the first time. but i'm impatient. and frankly have no desire to revisit this story so soon. so i'll leave that task to older, wiser me. if you like character-driven and relationship-focused work, if you don’t mind “no plot, just vibes,” or if you want a book that plays with form and prose but still seamlessly weaves in ever-important themes like identity and conformity, this is for you.
the meat of this story exists between the lines; dusapin’s writing creates for a hazy, atmospheric read, but it’s everything unsaid that elevates it and gives it depth. i think most people, especially myself, would benefit from a reread, catching all the details and making connections they might've missed the first time. but i'm impatient. and frankly have no desire to revisit this story so soon. so i'll leave that task to older, wiser me. if you like character-driven and relationship-focused work, if you don’t mind “no plot, just vibes,” or if you want a book that plays with form and prose but still seamlessly weaves in ever-important themes like identity and conformity, this is for you.
January 29, 2023
Melancholic, atmospheric, sparse, and contemplative… those are the adjectives I predicted I would use to describe this little novel before I started. By the time I finished, it’s fair to say the first three words applied, but I never reached the point of contemplation – unless one counts the fact I asked myself “Did I miss something here?” I felt a bit washed out, much like I imagine the dull sky over Sokcho to have looked like during its agonizing winter. Sokcho is situated in South Korea, but very near the border with North Korea. That fact, combined with the bleak tone, seemed to heighten my expectation of a bigger impact.
“Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real. They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it’s all fake, we’re on knife-edge, it could all give way any moment. We’re living in limbo. In a winter that never ends.”
The story is told from a young French-Korean woman’s point of view. I expected to get under her skin and feel a bit of what she was experiencing. I was certain she had an inner life, except I could never quite get there. I felt locked out and devoid of emotion. That makes me grumpy, because if a book has little plot then I expect a whole lot from the characters. I don’t require an intricate plot, but I need something more in its place! The secondary characters also fell flat, including the French graphic novelist, Kerrand. One day he appeared for a short stay at the rundown guesthouse in which our main character is employed. He was in search of inspiration for the next installment of his hero’s story. I’m sure that had I been able to latch onto this book more firmly, I would be able to reflect on identity, particularly that of the narrator – perhaps torn between her mother’s Korean roots and her vanished father’s French origins. But I didn’t really care to. Perhaps the passivity of the characters affected me more than I realized!
“People washed up there by chance, when they’d had too much to drink or missed the last bus home.”
Now that I’ve moaned for two entire paragraphs, it would seem likely I hated this book. But that’s not true. I didn’t hate it nor love it. It was fine. I think the writing was skillful enough, and the sense of place was convincing, even if it lacked an emotional drive. I tend to stand my books up next to one another, so to speak, when rating them. Those few books that have been read shortly before are used as a measuring stick. Books from the past are also recalled and used as guidelines. One of my buddies loved this; the other did not. Based on our lively discussions, I felt I was somewhere in the middle. This second buddy mentioned several other sparsely written, slim novels that packed a bigger punch. I’d agree with that list and would further add Cold Enough for Snow, Our Souls at Night, and A Whole Life. Compared to those novels, that’s where this one fell short for me. And yet, I may be inclined to read this author again to see if perhaps it’s just this story that didn’t quite jibe with me. Next time I’ll cross my fingers that the potential for a wallop of an ending doesn’t turn into a missed opportunity instead!
“Oozing winter and fish, Sokcho waited. That was Sokcho, always waiting, for tourists, boats, men, spring.”
“Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real. They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it’s all fake, we’re on knife-edge, it could all give way any moment. We’re living in limbo. In a winter that never ends.”
The story is told from a young French-Korean woman’s point of view. I expected to get under her skin and feel a bit of what she was experiencing. I was certain she had an inner life, except I could never quite get there. I felt locked out and devoid of emotion. That makes me grumpy, because if a book has little plot then I expect a whole lot from the characters. I don’t require an intricate plot, but I need something more in its place! The secondary characters also fell flat, including the French graphic novelist, Kerrand. One day he appeared for a short stay at the rundown guesthouse in which our main character is employed. He was in search of inspiration for the next installment of his hero’s story. I’m sure that had I been able to latch onto this book more firmly, I would be able to reflect on identity, particularly that of the narrator – perhaps torn between her mother’s Korean roots and her vanished father’s French origins. But I didn’t really care to. Perhaps the passivity of the characters affected me more than I realized!
“People washed up there by chance, when they’d had too much to drink or missed the last bus home.”
Now that I’ve moaned for two entire paragraphs, it would seem likely I hated this book. But that’s not true. I didn’t hate it nor love it. It was fine. I think the writing was skillful enough, and the sense of place was convincing, even if it lacked an emotional drive. I tend to stand my books up next to one another, so to speak, when rating them. Those few books that have been read shortly before are used as a measuring stick. Books from the past are also recalled and used as guidelines. One of my buddies loved this; the other did not. Based on our lively discussions, I felt I was somewhere in the middle. This second buddy mentioned several other sparsely written, slim novels that packed a bigger punch. I’d agree with that list and would further add Cold Enough for Snow, Our Souls at Night, and A Whole Life. Compared to those novels, that’s where this one fell short for me. And yet, I may be inclined to read this author again to see if perhaps it’s just this story that didn’t quite jibe with me. Next time I’ll cross my fingers that the potential for a wallop of an ending doesn’t turn into a missed opportunity instead!
“Oozing winter and fish, Sokcho waited. That was Sokcho, always waiting, for tourists, boats, men, spring.”
November 15, 2021
This is a beautifully spare novel with little action on the surface but plenty of emotion underneath. The story is set off-season in Sokcho, a South Korean beach town within a stone’s throw of the Korean DMZ. The narrator is a 24-year-old woman who has returned to her hometown of Sokcho after studying in Seoul. She meets a Frenchman, Kerrand, who is staying a a run-down hotel and most of the novel focuses on their interactions. So much is left unsaid in this quiet work, which is full of wistfulness, yearning, and hope.
May 28, 2021
GOOD BOOK!!!! Glad I read it for sure!!
Thanks s.penkevich!!
Loved the experience- atmospheric feelings - the characters— the slight tension and mysterious aura.
I’ll write a review later — OR NOT?/! ?/!
Still ‘thinking about this review retirement business!
Back to sleep for now.
I’m back....UPDATE:
I’ve never been to Korea, and I had certainly not heard of small-tourist town of Sokcho....in Southern Korea
where it’s quite a happening place in the summer with its warm weather, boats, and sunny beaches....
but winters, it’s very cold and windy. ...much more still and quiet.
A young girl - from Sokcho, is working in the guest house when a frenchman, named Kerrand, a
cartoonist comes to stay in the winter.
The journey with take with them feels visually tactile, and their relationship feels - in ways, ‘esoterically’ intimate....a little strange... but not inexplicable.....rather quite intriguing.
The entire story is not only enchanting...but leaves the reader thinking about the different ways it could continue to go...after we finish reading.
There was a scene where the unnamed narrator met her mother at the jjimjilbang…( the Korean bathhouse).
They took sulphuric baths, sipped barley porridge, peeled hard-boiled eggs, sat on stools and scrubbed each others back‘s.
Back in the changing room, they put on their pajamas to go into the mixed area: men and women lay their heads on small wooden blocks and relaxed on the warm resting floor.
I was envious reading that scene because the Korean spa in our city just closed (permanently), during the pandemic. I used to go often.
Kerrand invited the young girl to show him around...He wanted to see more of Sokcho.
They went hiking ...for hours...
They reached the grotto, a small cave temple with statues of Buddha set into alcoves. Kerrand studied them closely. He wanted to know about the Korean mountain myths and legends.
She told him one about Tangun, the son of the Lord of Heaven who was sent down to the highest mountain in Korea, where he took a she-bear for a wife and became the father of the Korean people. That mountain had symbolized the bridge linking heaven and earth ever since.
Kerrand brought his pen and sketchpad everywhere he went. He was always drawing. His drawings were always with either pencil or ink… Shades of gray.
She wanted to know why he didn’t use color. Kerrand told her there was no point.... he cared about light, and shapes, not color.
She wanted to live in Kerrand’s ink....
“I didn’t want to be his eyes on my world. I wanted to be seen. I wanted him to see me with his own eyes. I wanted him to draw me”.
A little dialogue sample:
“You’ve lived in Sokcho all your life?”
“I went to university in Seoul”.
“That must have been a shock to your system”.
“Not really. I lived with my aunt”.
Kerrand looked blankly at me. Sokcho was crawling with people in the summer, I said, because of its beaches. Seriously, it was just like Seoul, especially since they’d found that drama series here with that famous actor”.
**Note: the series mentioned in this book, “First Love”…was released in 2006…
Kerrand asked….
“Why did you come back?”
“It’s not forever. Park needed someone to work in the guest house”.
“And you were the only person he could find?”
“I had the feeling he was making fun of me. Yes I was, I said sharply. The truth was I could easily apply for a grant to study abroad, but I didn’t mention that. Then he asked me if I intended to spend the rest of my life working at the guest house “.
“I’d like to see France someday, maybe spend some time there”.
“I’m sure you will”.
“I said yes, maybe I would. I didn’t tell him I couldn’t leave my mother. Kerrand looked as if he wanted to say something else, but then he changed his mind and asked why I’d wanted to study French”.
“So I could speak a language my mother wouldn’t understand”.
Lots of food to get your taste buds going...[if you enjoy Korean food]...
...octopus purée
...Kimchi
...beef and raw fish
...red bean noodles
...ginger calamari
...tteokguk...[sliced rice cake soup] > made especially for the festive national holiday Seollal
...miyeokguk...[seaweed soup served with rice, cloves of garlic, marinated in vinegar and acorn jelly]
Other - supporting - interesting characters & relationship intrigues were the young girls boy friend Jun-oh, her mother aunt, and other guests staying at the guest house, and the culture and seaside setting itself.
People come and go into our lives....and it’s no better felt than when traveling....It’s easy to reflect on, well, fantasy-type relationships...
Those special short-term connections - not wanting them to end.
This story was a reminder ... that we all have memories of special people we have spent time with for short periods in our life…
never to see them again.....
with wonder if they think about us from time to time as we think about them.....with tender-preserved-relished-regards.
I simply loved this quiet book - I was soooo completely transported in Sokcho — feeling the emotions of isolation, and loneliness, .....
it’s a story mix with so many mixed subtleties .... it’s hauntingly beautiful.
Thanks s.penkevich!!
Loved the experience- atmospheric feelings - the characters— the slight tension and mysterious aura.
I’ll write a review later — OR NOT?/! ?/!
Still ‘thinking about this review retirement business!
Back to sleep for now.
I’m back....UPDATE:
I’ve never been to Korea, and I had certainly not heard of small-tourist town of Sokcho....in Southern Korea
where it’s quite a happening place in the summer with its warm weather, boats, and sunny beaches....
but winters, it’s very cold and windy. ...much more still and quiet.
A young girl - from Sokcho, is working in the guest house when a frenchman, named Kerrand, a
cartoonist comes to stay in the winter.
The journey with take with them feels visually tactile, and their relationship feels - in ways, ‘esoterically’ intimate....a little strange... but not inexplicable.....rather quite intriguing.
The entire story is not only enchanting...but leaves the reader thinking about the different ways it could continue to go...after we finish reading.
There was a scene where the unnamed narrator met her mother at the jjimjilbang…( the Korean bathhouse).
They took sulphuric baths, sipped barley porridge, peeled hard-boiled eggs, sat on stools and scrubbed each others back‘s.
Back in the changing room, they put on their pajamas to go into the mixed area: men and women lay their heads on small wooden blocks and relaxed on the warm resting floor.
I was envious reading that scene because the Korean spa in our city just closed (permanently), during the pandemic. I used to go often.
Kerrand invited the young girl to show him around...He wanted to see more of Sokcho.
They went hiking ...for hours...
They reached the grotto, a small cave temple with statues of Buddha set into alcoves. Kerrand studied them closely. He wanted to know about the Korean mountain myths and legends.
She told him one about Tangun, the son of the Lord of Heaven who was sent down to the highest mountain in Korea, where he took a she-bear for a wife and became the father of the Korean people. That mountain had symbolized the bridge linking heaven and earth ever since.
Kerrand brought his pen and sketchpad everywhere he went. He was always drawing. His drawings were always with either pencil or ink… Shades of gray.
She wanted to know why he didn’t use color. Kerrand told her there was no point.... he cared about light, and shapes, not color.
She wanted to live in Kerrand’s ink....
“I didn’t want to be his eyes on my world. I wanted to be seen. I wanted him to see me with his own eyes. I wanted him to draw me”.
A little dialogue sample:
“You’ve lived in Sokcho all your life?”
“I went to university in Seoul”.
“That must have been a shock to your system”.
“Not really. I lived with my aunt”.
Kerrand looked blankly at me. Sokcho was crawling with people in the summer, I said, because of its beaches. Seriously, it was just like Seoul, especially since they’d found that drama series here with that famous actor”.
**Note: the series mentioned in this book, “First Love”…was released in 2006…
Kerrand asked….
“Why did you come back?”
“It’s not forever. Park needed someone to work in the guest house”.
“And you were the only person he could find?”
“I had the feeling he was making fun of me. Yes I was, I said sharply. The truth was I could easily apply for a grant to study abroad, but I didn’t mention that. Then he asked me if I intended to spend the rest of my life working at the guest house “.
“I’d like to see France someday, maybe spend some time there”.
“I’m sure you will”.
“I said yes, maybe I would. I didn’t tell him I couldn’t leave my mother. Kerrand looked as if he wanted to say something else, but then he changed his mind and asked why I’d wanted to study French”.
“So I could speak a language my mother wouldn’t understand”.
Lots of food to get your taste buds going...[if you enjoy Korean food]...
...octopus purée
...Kimchi
...beef and raw fish
...red bean noodles
...ginger calamari
...tteokguk...[sliced rice cake soup] > made especially for the festive national holiday Seollal
...miyeokguk...[seaweed soup served with rice, cloves of garlic, marinated in vinegar and acorn jelly]
Other - supporting - interesting characters & relationship intrigues were the young girls boy friend Jun-oh, her mother aunt, and other guests staying at the guest house, and the culture and seaside setting itself.
People come and go into our lives....and it’s no better felt than when traveling....It’s easy to reflect on, well, fantasy-type relationships...
Those special short-term connections - not wanting them to end.
This story was a reminder ... that we all have memories of special people we have spent time with for short periods in our life…
never to see them again.....
with wonder if they think about us from time to time as we think about them.....with tender-preserved-relished-regards.
I simply loved this quiet book - I was soooo completely transported in Sokcho — feeling the emotions of isolation, and loneliness, .....
it’s a story mix with so many mixed subtleties .... it’s hauntingly beautiful.
June 16, 2021
This book! So spare, so smart, with an incredible dynamic among its two leads, and no wasted motion. Rarely do I root so hard while reading - rarely am I as pleased with an ending. Meditations on art, place, eating, and the body...don't miss it. Read it in two hours, thrilled the whole time.
June 23, 2021
This is a very layered novelette that can be interpreted in different ways, but has to be read underneath the words on the page, if that makes any sense. One sentence can have 2 or 3 different meanings, depending on the reader. Beautifully written, but takes some work. It may take me a while to understand the ending, or maybe never.
I haven't seen any other reviewers mention the fact that our unnamed heroine has a real problem with body image and food. She cooks but doesn't eat, is excessively thin, binges and vomits and feels shame when she can't control herself. She's emotionally distant from others and likes it that way. Until the artist books a room in the guest house where she works, and she starts to feel......what?
An unusual book, and impossible to categorize.
I haven't seen any other reviewers mention the fact that our unnamed heroine has a real problem with body image and food. She cooks but doesn't eat, is excessively thin, binges and vomits and feels shame when she can't control herself. She's emotionally distant from others and likes it that way. Until the artist books a room in the guest house where she works, and she starts to feel......what?
An unusual book, and impossible to categorize.
September 27, 2022
Real Rating: 4.75* of five, rounded up out of respect for the difficult job this terrific tale presented its translator
WINNER OF THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATION! Watch the ceremony here.
I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THOSE LIBRARIES! THEY NEED US, AND WE NEED THEM.
My Review: I can't say too much, because there isn't one helluva lot of book here.
This is the most Duras thing I've read that wasn't set in France. This is what Impressionism looks like in words. This is the way you take a simple, even banal, story of a young woman whose life is in neutral and chunk it into first gear without using the clutch.
You can feel a good, faithful translation. It fits and it means something you won't ever find anywhere else. This is a good, faithful translation by that metric. I haven't read the French but, should it ever swim across my bow, I will grab it and gobble it down to see how the flavor of fugu feels in French.
Mother and daughter at daggers drawn, sisters locked in battle, no one is getting a leg up on anyone else in this bitter little pill. It's always the family that makes you feel the worst when they could choose to give you their best. It's certainly true that South Korean culture is the epicenter of the plastic surgery world. The pressure to "look perfect" whatever that means there is powerful, and it's astonishing to me how high the percentage of South Koreans who've had serious work done is. It's no surprise that Jun-Oh, the narrator's boyfriend, is caught up in it...it makes sense, in that world, and her categorical refusal to give in to the not-subtle pressures he puts on her, her mother puts on her, and her mother's sister puts on her to "fix her flaws" is proof to me that this is someone I'd like to spend more time with.
Food is a huge part of this read...you'll read words in Korean that aren't translated, eg tteok, and it's on you to go figure out what the heck they are, or not if you don't care. I like that in a book. I will figure out what a tteok is (a rice cake made with steamed flour made of various grains, including glutinous or non-glutinous rice) and why it would smell of cold oil (some meal-base versions, not desserts, are fried) if I decide it means something to me. In a nutshell, the plot is nothing; in reality, it is Everything...how we mistreat our intimates without really giving it a thought; how we form alliances and attachments that never ever get to the surface of our lives (poor old Park!); how completely we fail to find our world's gifts until they make the gravity double and the body sink into a slough of despond with their absence.
Most of all, though, reading this beautiful book is an exercise in allowing words to do their work in you. You are not there, you more than likely have never been there, but through the magic of fiction here you are:
Don't miss the chance to read this book. It deserved the win in the 2021 Best Translated Literature category at the National Book Awards.
WINNER OF THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATION! Watch the ceremony here.
I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THOSE LIBRARIES! THEY NEED US, AND WE NEED THEM.
My Review: I can't say too much, because there isn't one helluva lot of book here.
He’d never understand what Sokcho was like. You had to be born here, live through the winters. The smells, the octopus. The isolation.
–and–
A rubber-gloved hand pointed us in the right direction.
Too much of everything. Too big, too cold, too empty. The clatter of our shoes on the marble slabs rang out.
–and–
Oozing winter and fish, Sokcho waited. That was Sokcho, always waiting, for tourists, boats, men, spring.
This is the most Duras thing I've read that wasn't set in France. This is what Impressionism looks like in words. This is the way you take a simple, even banal, story of a young woman whose life is in neutral and chunk it into first gear without using the clutch.
You can feel a good, faithful translation. It fits and it means something you won't ever find anywhere else. This is a good, faithful translation by that metric. I haven't read the French but, should it ever swim across my bow, I will grab it and gobble it down to see how the flavor of fugu feels in French.
Mother and daughter at daggers drawn, sisters locked in battle, no one is getting a leg up on anyone else in this bitter little pill. It's always the family that makes you feel the worst when they could choose to give you their best. It's certainly true that South Korean culture is the epicenter of the plastic surgery world. The pressure to "look perfect" whatever that means there is powerful, and it's astonishing to me how high the percentage of South Koreans who've had serious work done is. It's no surprise that Jun-Oh, the narrator's boyfriend, is caught up in it...it makes sense, in that world, and her categorical refusal to give in to the not-subtle pressures he puts on her, her mother puts on her, and her mother's sister puts on her to "fix her flaws" is proof to me that this is someone I'd like to spend more time with.
Food is a huge part of this read...you'll read words in Korean that aren't translated, eg tteok, and it's on you to go figure out what the heck they are, or not if you don't care. I like that in a book. I will figure out what a tteok is (a rice cake made with steamed flour made of various grains, including glutinous or non-glutinous rice) and why it would smell of cold oil (some meal-base versions, not desserts, are fried) if I decide it means something to me. In a nutshell, the plot is nothing; in reality, it is Everything...how we mistreat our intimates without really giving it a thought; how we form alliances and attachments that never ever get to the surface of our lives (poor old Park!); how completely we fail to find our world's gifts until they make the gravity double and the body sink into a slough of despond with their absence.
Most of all, though, reading this beautiful book is an exercise in allowing words to do their work in you. You are not there, you more than likely have never been there, but through the magic of fiction here you are:
All night long the town was entombed in frost. The temperature fell to minus twenty-seven degrees, the first time it had happened in years. Curled up under the covers, I blew on my hands and rubbed them between my thighs. Outside, against the onslaught of ice, the waves struggled to resist, moving ever more slowly and heavily, cracking as they collapsed in defeat on the shoreline. I bundled myself up in my overcoat, the only way I could find sleep.
–and–
The rain hammered down, the sea rising beneath it in spikes like the spines of a sea urchin.
–and–
‘What I mean is you may have had your wars, I’m sure there are scars on your beaches, but that’s all in the past. Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real. They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it’s all fake, we’re on a knife-edge, it could all give way any moment. We’re living in limbo. In a winter that never ends.’
Don't miss the chance to read this book. It deserved the win in the 2021 Best Translated Literature category at the National Book Awards.
August 27, 2021
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I have once again a bone to pick with the person responsible for the blurb of a novel. Elisa Shua Dusapin is a Franco-Korean female author so that means she will be compared to a French author (Marguerite Duras) and to an author from East Asia (Sayaka Murata). Just like an an author from Latin America will be inevitably be compared to Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez (often regardless of whether they have even written a magical realist work) or an Italian author will be pitched as being the new Elena Ferrante. This is so LAZY. Case in point, stylistically and tone-wise Winter in Sokcho shares little in common Murata and Duras. If anything, the protagonist's somewhat detached narration brought to mind Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan. Okay, now that I have gotten that out of my chest...onto the actual review.
As the title suggests Winter in Sokcho takes place during the winter in Sokcho a town in South Korea near the country's border to North Korea. Our nameless narrator, a listless young woman, works at a guesthouse as a receptionist. She has a boyfriend she does particularly care for and seem to have no ambitions. Other than the fact that he is French, our protagonist knows little about her father's identity. Her mother, alongside others, thinks that she should go to Seoul and seem to believe that our mc's life would be easier if she underwent some cosmetic surgery. Our protagonist's rather unenthusiastic daily-routine is interrupted by the arrival of a French cartoonist who is staying at her guesthouse. The two speak little but our narrator is shown to feel a certain lure towards him.
While I can see that for some this novella will be alluring, I found it boring and clichéd. The story lacked an 'edge', be it a biting humour or a more subversive protagonist. Nothing much happens and most pages seem dedicated to our narrator's navel-gazing. There are also some odd description and word choices, such as when our protagonist notes that her "breasts tightened". Wtf? And, no, she is not a bodybuilder. If she is aroused, wouldn't have made more sense for her nipples to harden?
Not only did I find the protagonist to be bland but her rapport with the French guy came across as flat. Yet, I am meant to believe that they 'share' a connection...
I found this novella to be very much style over substance, which I am sure works for many other readers, I am just not one of them.
“Oozing winter and fish, Sokcho waited. That was Sokcho, always waiting, for tourists, boats, men, spring.”
I have once again a bone to pick with the person responsible for the blurb of a novel. Elisa Shua Dusapin is a Franco-Korean female author so that means she will be compared to a French author (Marguerite Duras) and to an author from East Asia (Sayaka Murata). Just like an an author from Latin America will be inevitably be compared to Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez (often regardless of whether they have even written a magical realist work) or an Italian author will be pitched as being the new Elena Ferrante. This is so LAZY. Case in point, stylistically and tone-wise Winter in Sokcho shares little in common Murata and Duras. If anything, the protagonist's somewhat detached narration brought to mind Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan. Okay, now that I have gotten that out of my chest...onto the actual review.
As the title suggests Winter in Sokcho takes place during the winter in Sokcho a town in South Korea near the country's border to North Korea. Our nameless narrator, a listless young woman, works at a guesthouse as a receptionist. She has a boyfriend she does particularly care for and seem to have no ambitions. Other than the fact that he is French, our protagonist knows little about her father's identity. Her mother, alongside others, thinks that she should go to Seoul and seem to believe that our mc's life would be easier if she underwent some cosmetic surgery. Our protagonist's rather unenthusiastic daily-routine is interrupted by the arrival of a French cartoonist who is staying at her guesthouse. The two speak little but our narrator is shown to feel a certain lure towards him.
While I can see that for some this novella will be alluring, I found it boring and clichéd. The story lacked an 'edge', be it a biting humour or a more subversive protagonist. Nothing much happens and most pages seem dedicated to our narrator's navel-gazing. There are also some odd description and word choices, such as when our protagonist notes that her "breasts tightened". Wtf? And, no, she is not a bodybuilder. If she is aroused, wouldn't have made more sense for her nipples to harden?
Not only did I find the protagonist to be bland but her rapport with the French guy came across as flat. Yet, I am meant to believe that they 'share' a connection...
I found this novella to be very much style over substance, which I am sure works for many other readers, I am just not one of them.
January 28, 2020
For those who don’t know, Sockcho is a town in South Korea, which is a tourist haven. There are lakes, beaches and coastal views. Despite the fact that it is a must see South Korean destination, it also is located near the North Korean border. Sokcho is also the setting for this wonderful novel.
The narrator of the book works at her mother’s guesthouse and occasionally lives there as she lives with her boyfriend in a nearby apartment. In a way she is a sort of misfit ; she is irritated by her mother’s insistence that she marries and her constant criticisms about her looks. Also she’s not too impressed by her boyfriend’s burgeoning model career. Since it’s winter the flow of tourists is slow and she’s bored, just performing tasks to fill up her time.
One day a French graphic novelist Kerrand, arrives in order to do some research for his latest comic and the narrator’s life changes subtly
The narrator is curious about the Kerrand’s western ways. His artwork, his disdain for spicy food. Yet the two strike up an odd relationship. As both are outsiders they get along with each other, but not in a romantic way. In fact there are times when Kerrand’s nonchalance for South Korea, and at one point North, puzzles her. She also discovers that Kerrand is drawing her and doesn’t really appreciate his depiction of her, so she finally persuades him to open his eyes and accept Korean culture which leads to an enigmatic conclusion.
On the surface Winter in Sokcho is like a quirky romance but it goes much deeper than that as the book tackles cultural identity, gender roles, traditional mentality vs contemporary values. The style is economic but the emotional resonance packs quite a punch. Definitely the less is more approach works well.
At one point in the book, the narrator and Kerrand are discussing beaches. Kerrand states that he prefers the ones in Normandy, despite the fact that there are still scars from WW2. The narrators shrugs her shoulders saying that world war 2 is long gone and to stop lingering over the past and reminds him that there are more pressing situations:
‘What I mean is you may have had your wars. I’m sure there are scars on your beaches but that’s all in the past. Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real. They build hotels, put up neon signs , but it’s all fake, we’re on a knife-edge, it could all give way any moment. we’re living in limbo. In a winter that never ends.‘
I think the above quote summarises the book’s themes perfectly as it clearly shows the reader, the marked difference between the attitudes of our two protagonists. Which also could serve as a signpost for the narrator’s future actions with Kerrand.
It’s easy to get lost while picking apart Winter in Sokcho. Both the narrator and Kerrand are fascinating characters and have depth. There’s a lot of details to ponder over. It is a rich novel, not to mention that the translation from French is smooth and brings out the book’s nuances. It also gives a snapshot of a country which I’ve never been to. When a book manages to perk up my interest in a foreign culture AND is to thematically rich, then it’s a surefire winner for me.
Many thanks to Daunt Books for providing a requested copy of Winter in Sokcho in exchange for an honest review.
The narrator of the book works at her mother’s guesthouse and occasionally lives there as she lives with her boyfriend in a nearby apartment. In a way she is a sort of misfit ; she is irritated by her mother’s insistence that she marries and her constant criticisms about her looks. Also she’s not too impressed by her boyfriend’s burgeoning model career. Since it’s winter the flow of tourists is slow and she’s bored, just performing tasks to fill up her time.
One day a French graphic novelist Kerrand, arrives in order to do some research for his latest comic and the narrator’s life changes subtly
The narrator is curious about the Kerrand’s western ways. His artwork, his disdain for spicy food. Yet the two strike up an odd relationship. As both are outsiders they get along with each other, but not in a romantic way. In fact there are times when Kerrand’s nonchalance for South Korea, and at one point North, puzzles her. She also discovers that Kerrand is drawing her and doesn’t really appreciate his depiction of her, so she finally persuades him to open his eyes and accept Korean culture which leads to an enigmatic conclusion.
On the surface Winter in Sokcho is like a quirky romance but it goes much deeper than that as the book tackles cultural identity, gender roles, traditional mentality vs contemporary values. The style is economic but the emotional resonance packs quite a punch. Definitely the less is more approach works well.
At one point in the book, the narrator and Kerrand are discussing beaches. Kerrand states that he prefers the ones in Normandy, despite the fact that there are still scars from WW2. The narrators shrugs her shoulders saying that world war 2 is long gone and to stop lingering over the past and reminds him that there are more pressing situations:
‘What I mean is you may have had your wars. I’m sure there are scars on your beaches but that’s all in the past. Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real. They build hotels, put up neon signs , but it’s all fake, we’re on a knife-edge, it could all give way any moment. we’re living in limbo. In a winter that never ends.‘
I think the above quote summarises the book’s themes perfectly as it clearly shows the reader, the marked difference between the attitudes of our two protagonists. Which also could serve as a signpost for the narrator’s future actions with Kerrand.
It’s easy to get lost while picking apart Winter in Sokcho. Both the narrator and Kerrand are fascinating characters and have depth. There’s a lot of details to ponder over. It is a rich novel, not to mention that the translation from French is smooth and brings out the book’s nuances. It also gives a snapshot of a country which I’ve never been to. When a book manages to perk up my interest in a foreign culture AND is to thematically rich, then it’s a surefire winner for me.
Many thanks to Daunt Books for providing a requested copy of Winter in Sokcho in exchange for an honest review.
July 2, 2023
Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Dusapin is one of the most atmospheric books I have read in a long while. This one was “well-moody”. I want to read more from this author.
This story is based in Sokcho, a popular tourist resort town in the north of South Korea, not far from the border with North Korea. The young woman narrator is unnamed and is working in a run-down hotel managed by a miserable man called Park. Our narrator has a relationship with an idiot boyfriend who wants to be a model in Seoul – they have no love in their relationship. He often suggests she should consider having plastic surgery (bad move), Interestingly, plastic surgery is raised by several characters in this story. I don’t know why. Is it a common thing in South Korea?
A famous graphic-novel artist called Kerrand stays at the hotel for some time to draw inspiration from the area for his next ‘prize-winning’ piece of work. Kerrand and our narrator have an interesting relationship of sorts. He treats her with indifference, ignoring her at times, interested at other times. Kerrand wants her to teach him about Sokcho and Korea – personally, I think he’s a bit strange. The narrator seems infatuated in him – but this isn’t presented in any obvious way, just the way she interacts with him, and thinks about him. I was hooked on where this was going, would they jump in the sack, would they have a plutonic relationship – or was I overcooking the whole thing?
A couple of things:
1. The writing is sparse, almost barren. Because of this, I was totally engrossed.
2. The general mood here is bleak. Sure, the fact Sokcho is being smothered by a brutally cold winter plays a part. However, the continued war with the North – still no ceasefire – means people are living on a knife edge. There are still sporadic acts of cross border violence occurring – how can this not add to the stark, bleak mood of a place?
The narrator’s mother and auntie are uber-dragons and treat the young woman appallingly. Not in any physical way – just the things they say such as “you should consider plastic surgery”, “eat more”, “don’t get fat” – criticising her cooking, her clothes. I felt like picking the girl up and bringing her home – she wasn’t receiving any warmth from anyone. I can’t even recall her smiling or being the least bit happy.
Fugu – a dish made from the ultra-toxic puffer fish makes an appearance. The fact they start cutting into this fish while it is still alive is appalling. The mother also removes the teeth of the poor blighters, so they don’t bite each other in the fish tanks – that must hurt too. The certified chef then needs to skilfully remove the skin and the toxic viscera before slicing it for human consumption. This dish, eaten raw is a real delicacy. Up to 100 people a year die eating this fish, due to not preparing it properly.
Anyway, this story had me gripped. The writing was frugal but totally engaging. The characters were interesting, and this reader just had no idea where this was going. A story about people and place, no plot needed.
I loved this.
Thanks to my buddy readers Candi and Pedro for putting up with my over-exuberance on this one, I couldn’t stop banging on about how much I loved it 😊
4 Stars (4.5 rounded down, but just can’t round it up to 5 – I considered it though - sorry Pedro).
This story is based in Sokcho, a popular tourist resort town in the north of South Korea, not far from the border with North Korea. The young woman narrator is unnamed and is working in a run-down hotel managed by a miserable man called Park. Our narrator has a relationship with an idiot boyfriend who wants to be a model in Seoul – they have no love in their relationship. He often suggests she should consider having plastic surgery (bad move), Interestingly, plastic surgery is raised by several characters in this story. I don’t know why. Is it a common thing in South Korea?
A famous graphic-novel artist called Kerrand stays at the hotel for some time to draw inspiration from the area for his next ‘prize-winning’ piece of work. Kerrand and our narrator have an interesting relationship of sorts. He treats her with indifference, ignoring her at times, interested at other times. Kerrand wants her to teach him about Sokcho and Korea – personally, I think he’s a bit strange. The narrator seems infatuated in him – but this isn’t presented in any obvious way, just the way she interacts with him, and thinks about him. I was hooked on where this was going, would they jump in the sack, would they have a plutonic relationship – or was I overcooking the whole thing?
A couple of things:
1. The writing is sparse, almost barren. Because of this, I was totally engrossed.
2. The general mood here is bleak. Sure, the fact Sokcho is being smothered by a brutally cold winter plays a part. However, the continued war with the North – still no ceasefire – means people are living on a knife edge. There are still sporadic acts of cross border violence occurring – how can this not add to the stark, bleak mood of a place?
The narrator’s mother and auntie are uber-dragons and treat the young woman appallingly. Not in any physical way – just the things they say such as “you should consider plastic surgery”, “eat more”, “don’t get fat” – criticising her cooking, her clothes. I felt like picking the girl up and bringing her home – she wasn’t receiving any warmth from anyone. I can’t even recall her smiling or being the least bit happy.
Fugu – a dish made from the ultra-toxic puffer fish makes an appearance. The fact they start cutting into this fish while it is still alive is appalling. The mother also removes the teeth of the poor blighters, so they don’t bite each other in the fish tanks – that must hurt too. The certified chef then needs to skilfully remove the skin and the toxic viscera before slicing it for human consumption. This dish, eaten raw is a real delicacy. Up to 100 people a year die eating this fish, due to not preparing it properly.
Anyway, this story had me gripped. The writing was frugal but totally engaging. The characters were interesting, and this reader just had no idea where this was going. A story about people and place, no plot needed.
I loved this.
Thanks to my buddy readers Candi and Pedro for putting up with my over-exuberance on this one, I couldn’t stop banging on about how much I loved it 😊
4 Stars (4.5 rounded down, but just can’t round it up to 5 – I considered it though - sorry Pedro).
November 11, 2022
I picked this after reading a review from one of my GR friends, link below.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The previous work of fiction I read was a 500-page novel that took me a month to finish. This book is more of a novella, but I found it so compelling that I read the whole thing in less than 24 hours. That said, I was left a bit puzzled at the end.
I’ve read that the author is of mixed French and Korean heritage, and she chooses the same background for the narrator here, a 24-year-old woman with a French father and a Korean mother, although she (the narrator) has never known her father.
The setting is an important part of the book. The narrator works as a receptionist in a rundown guest house in the coastal city of Sokcho. I’ve no idea how the city in the novel compares to the real-life location, but here it’s portrayed as a popular holiday destination (and a fishing port). As the title suggests, the events of the novel take place in winter and for me the author captures the feel of a resort during the off-season. The city lies near the DMZ and the frozen Korean conflict also casts a shadow.
The narrator’s unusual background left her somewhat isolated as a child, although less for her mixed nationality than for the fact she does not have a father at home. As an adult she continues in this way. She has a boyfriend, Jun-oh, but neither of them seems emotionally close to the other.
A new guest arrives at the hotel in the form of Yan Kerrand, a French writer/artist of graphic novels. She immediately develops an interest in him, treating him differently from the other guests and becoming his unofficial local guide. There are several strong hints that she has a sexual interest in Kerrand, but at the same time she actively keeps him at a distance.
There’s a LOT about body image in this novel. The narrator has a long scar on her leg, the legacy of a childhood accident. She ponders whether to get rid of her glasses and switch to contact lenses. She also seemed to me to suffer from something resembling bulimia. Meanwhile Jun-oh is an aspiring model who discusses whether he should have plastic surgery, and one of the few other residents at the guest house is a woman swathed in bandages as she has had plastic surgery. Descriptions of weeping and bleeding wounds feature in the text. Another is that the narrator’s mother works at a fish market. There are lots of descriptions of gutting fish, octopus, squid etc. The yuck factor is strong with this one!
Things get a bit weird towards the end, but the prose continued to exercise a hypnotic effect on me.
I don’t think I really understood this novel, but I still I found it intriguing all the way through.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The previous work of fiction I read was a 500-page novel that took me a month to finish. This book is more of a novella, but I found it so compelling that I read the whole thing in less than 24 hours. That said, I was left a bit puzzled at the end.
I’ve read that the author is of mixed French and Korean heritage, and she chooses the same background for the narrator here, a 24-year-old woman with a French father and a Korean mother, although she (the narrator) has never known her father.
The setting is an important part of the book. The narrator works as a receptionist in a rundown guest house in the coastal city of Sokcho. I’ve no idea how the city in the novel compares to the real-life location, but here it’s portrayed as a popular holiday destination (and a fishing port). As the title suggests, the events of the novel take place in winter and for me the author captures the feel of a resort during the off-season. The city lies near the DMZ and the frozen Korean conflict also casts a shadow.
The narrator’s unusual background left her somewhat isolated as a child, although less for her mixed nationality than for the fact she does not have a father at home. As an adult she continues in this way. She has a boyfriend, Jun-oh, but neither of them seems emotionally close to the other.
A new guest arrives at the hotel in the form of Yan Kerrand, a French writer/artist of graphic novels. She immediately develops an interest in him, treating him differently from the other guests and becoming his unofficial local guide. There are several strong hints that she has a sexual interest in Kerrand, but at the same time she actively keeps him at a distance.
There’s a LOT about body image in this novel. The narrator has a long scar on her leg, the legacy of a childhood accident. She ponders whether to get rid of her glasses and switch to contact lenses. She also seemed to me to suffer from something resembling bulimia. Meanwhile Jun-oh is an aspiring model who discusses whether he should have plastic surgery, and one of the few other residents at the guest house is a woman swathed in bandages as she has had plastic surgery. Descriptions of weeping and bleeding wounds feature in the text. Another is that the narrator’s mother works at a fish market. There are lots of descriptions of gutting fish, octopus, squid etc. The yuck factor is strong with this one!
Things get a bit weird towards the end, but the prose continued to exercise a hypnotic effect on me.
I don’t think I really understood this novel, but I still I found it intriguing all the way through.
August 6, 2022
Sokcho felt like a wintry cocoon as I wandered through the pages of this novel. Employing language that is sometimes spare, sometimes lush and always evocative, Elisa Shua Dusapin creates a story of self discovery imbued with melancholy, longing and wistfulness.
The novel is set in the eponymous town of Sokcho, located near the North Korean border. In the summer, Sokcho is vibrant and full of life. In the winter, when the story takes place, the town imparts an aura of loneliness and somnolence as if it is hibernating and waiting to spring to life as the warm weather approaches.
This duality of mood sets a tone for the narrative. An unnamed narrator drives the story forward. She is a twenty four year old French Korean who has been university educated but has returned to Sokcho to be near her mother. She works in a decaying guest house that is barely occupied during the winter season.She staggers through her daily routine with a sense of emotional detachment while she struggles to define her inner core. She is aroused from her daily torpor when an unexpected visitor comes to the guest house. Yan Kerrand is a graphic artist who has come to Korea seeking to find a vision that will perfectly fit the concluding volume of his graphic novel series. Kerrand is much older than our narrator yet shares her sense of restlessness and unmooring.Haltingly the two form a relationship, grudgingly and obliquely revealing parts of themselves as the narrator accompanies Kerrand on his quest to discover the essence of Korea.
The beauty of the novel unfolds as the relationship between the two protagonists develops. The novel is suffused with images of division and repressed inner conflict that is augmented by the visual descriptions of the landscape as the couple travels about. Their conversation is sparing, allowing the landscape to emerge as a graphic and visual character that mirrors the internal moods of the protagonists.Both the narrator and Kerrand seem to have arrived at a liminal emotional precipice. They are circumspect in their conversations, revealing parts of themselves and then suddenly retreating to avoid further intimacy.
The relationship between the two is enigmatic and full of ellipsis. Much is left unsaid and we can only intuit some of the predominant themes of identity,heritage,belonging,restlessness and post colonial trauma.By the novel’s end, we are left to ponder if these two people will mirror Sokcho’s rhythms and emerge from their self imposed cocoons and discover their emotional springtime awakening.
The novel is set in the eponymous town of Sokcho, located near the North Korean border. In the summer, Sokcho is vibrant and full of life. In the winter, when the story takes place, the town imparts an aura of loneliness and somnolence as if it is hibernating and waiting to spring to life as the warm weather approaches.
This duality of mood sets a tone for the narrative. An unnamed narrator drives the story forward. She is a twenty four year old French Korean who has been university educated but has returned to Sokcho to be near her mother. She works in a decaying guest house that is barely occupied during the winter season.She staggers through her daily routine with a sense of emotional detachment while she struggles to define her inner core. She is aroused from her daily torpor when an unexpected visitor comes to the guest house. Yan Kerrand is a graphic artist who has come to Korea seeking to find a vision that will perfectly fit the concluding volume of his graphic novel series. Kerrand is much older than our narrator yet shares her sense of restlessness and unmooring.Haltingly the two form a relationship, grudgingly and obliquely revealing parts of themselves as the narrator accompanies Kerrand on his quest to discover the essence of Korea.
The beauty of the novel unfolds as the relationship between the two protagonists develops. The novel is suffused with images of division and repressed inner conflict that is augmented by the visual descriptions of the landscape as the couple travels about. Their conversation is sparing, allowing the landscape to emerge as a graphic and visual character that mirrors the internal moods of the protagonists.Both the narrator and Kerrand seem to have arrived at a liminal emotional precipice. They are circumspect in their conversations, revealing parts of themselves and then suddenly retreating to avoid further intimacy.
The relationship between the two is enigmatic and full of ellipsis. Much is left unsaid and we can only intuit some of the predominant themes of identity,heritage,belonging,restlessness and post colonial trauma.By the novel’s end, we are left to ponder if these two people will mirror Sokcho’s rhythms and emerge from their self imposed cocoons and discover their emotional springtime awakening.
January 27, 2023
When I read Elisa Shua Dusapin's sophomore novel,
The Pachinko Parlour
, last year, I finished it and immediately read it again. I felt like there was so much beneath the surface I was just starting to glean from my first reading, and the second time around really solidified how expertly crafted the whole thing was. My experience with Winter in Sokcho was no different. After turning that last page, I knew I had to read it once more, and once again I was so glad I did.
In this story we follow the 24 year old unnamed female narrator who works at a guesthouse (like a hostel or small hotel) in the city of Sokcho. She sees her single mother occasionally and has a boyfriend who is heading to Seoul to pursue a modeling career. At her job she encounters various people—Japanese hikers, those recovering from cosmetic surgery—and one day a French graphic novelist comes to stay and work. Their encounters shape the story as we follow them on day trips around the city and surrounding area and the conversations they have about life, art, language, national identity, war, and more.
The narrator herself is French-Korean, her father being a French man who left her mother when the narrator was small and is not in her life. Her status as mixed race causes her to feel like an outsider in her community, and that sense of loneliness and melancholy permeates the story which Dusapin writes so well (I should note too this is another flawless translation from Aneesa Abbas Higgins).
I loved how multilayered this story is. There is the literal story going on on the page; but beneath it is so many nuanced and understated themes about personhood, belonging, identity, our relationship to food and art. It would be easy to write this off as boring or uninteresting if only read at the surface level. Our narrator gets up, does some cleaning, walks around, observes things. But those observations speak volumes to what she's focused on, what she thinks about, and in turn contrast and conflict at times with the French graphic novelist which creates a real tension in the story. Those moments of opposition made me think about what I think about certain things and who is 'right,' if anyone even is.
I could go on and on about this book but all I will say is I'm so glad to have found Dusapin! I adore her writing and the vibes of her stories, and I cannot wait for her 3rd novel to get translated into English!
In this story we follow the 24 year old unnamed female narrator who works at a guesthouse (like a hostel or small hotel) in the city of Sokcho. She sees her single mother occasionally and has a boyfriend who is heading to Seoul to pursue a modeling career. At her job she encounters various people—Japanese hikers, those recovering from cosmetic surgery—and one day a French graphic novelist comes to stay and work. Their encounters shape the story as we follow them on day trips around the city and surrounding area and the conversations they have about life, art, language, national identity, war, and more.
The narrator herself is French-Korean, her father being a French man who left her mother when the narrator was small and is not in her life. Her status as mixed race causes her to feel like an outsider in her community, and that sense of loneliness and melancholy permeates the story which Dusapin writes so well (I should note too this is another flawless translation from Aneesa Abbas Higgins).
I loved how multilayered this story is. There is the literal story going on on the page; but beneath it is so many nuanced and understated themes about personhood, belonging, identity, our relationship to food and art. It would be easy to write this off as boring or uninteresting if only read at the surface level. Our narrator gets up, does some cleaning, walks around, observes things. But those observations speak volumes to what she's focused on, what she thinks about, and in turn contrast and conflict at times with the French graphic novelist which creates a real tension in the story. Those moments of opposition made me think about what I think about certain things and who is 'right,' if anyone even is.
I could go on and on about this book but all I will say is I'm so glad to have found Dusapin! I adore her writing and the vibes of her stories, and I cannot wait for her 3rd novel to get translated into English!
August 25, 2021
The cover art is made to look like a picture postcard, and the story feels a bit like a postcard from this South Korean tourist town of Sokcho near the border with North Korea. What unfolds is both exotic and familiar. A young woman working in a guest house becomes intrigued by a visitor from France sketching out a graphic novel. She studies this man, and at the same time explores her feelings about her mother, her boyfriend, her body, and her French and Korean heritage. There is a lot of fish--scales and intestines and innards and ink.
But reading it is all about the voice. It feels right on the verge of pain, like when you cut yourself and are waiting for it to start hurting, but at the same time, like someone opened a window and let in a fresh breeze.
Remarkable.
But reading it is all about the voice. It feels right on the verge of pain, like when you cut yourself and are waiting for it to start hurting, but at the same time, like someone opened a window and let in a fresh breeze.
Remarkable.
December 19, 2020
A short, atmospheric novella relating the enigmatic beauty of an unremarkable life. A quiet, heartfelt rendering of human beings intertwined in the awkward embrace of modern life in an out of the way place. I really enjoyed the setting. A well-structured short work, but less striking than a more-developed novel would've been. It was a tight and smooth read, fraught with elegant expression and straightforward narration, with moments of icy clarity and melancholy meditations. An innkeeper's life, in a nutshell. She meets a graphic novelist. The relationship is a bit stark and undramatic. Plenty of subtleties. A bit like an old foreign film, grainy, radiating depth of feeling, but nonetheless transitory.
December 19, 2023
There isn't much flesh on these bones, but Winter in Sokcho adds up to more than the sum of its parts. The imagery of snow and ice and raw seafood mesmerized me. The novel wears its themes with no subtlety whatsoever: plastic surgery and unraveling bandages, torn-up drawings of idealized women, body shaming, binge eating, male models, nude polaroids—in short, everything you'd expect of a novel about body image and self-destructive beauty standards. And yet somehow the book leaves the unshakeable impression that it is actually about something else entirely; that something impossible to place lurks behind the obvious symbolism of a divided country, a frozen war, a single mother and her mixed-race child, a woman effacing herself. The book refuses to be about freedom, or choice, or trauma; it insists on being, instead, about art, and fish soup, and winter, and desire.
November 14, 2024
A reread on a cold day for that wonderful sense of Sokcho cold and fish and octopus and frozen pipes and frozen souls.
Original review
A very slim novel that follows a young Korean girl poised on the brink of her quarter-life crisis and the enigmatic French artist who throws her various identities, and her various relationships, into relief.
There’s much to enjoy: the economical, ambiguous nature of the storytelling, the unusual setting, which is both instantly recognizable (off-season beach town) and clearly “other,” (a few miles from the border with North Korea), the evocative descriptions of fish, octopus, cold, family, the themes of foreignness, physical perfection and imperfection, and the central relationship, which might be a thwarted romance, and might be a girl in search of a missing father. It all builds to a satisfying, "surprising but inevitable" conclusion.
I couldn’t fully enjoy this book simply because the writing style is not quite my thing: ambiguous and elegant, yes, but also loaded with heavy metaphor. The dialogue is good in moments when the characters talk sideways about culture and the Frenchman consistently fails to understand, but I found it a bit portentous when they talked about art. All very, “you will not find what you are looking for here,” (cue soft, gloomy music).
All in all, I’m glad to have read this and it has given me plenty to think about. Dusapin is not quite my kind of writer, and I disagree that she writes in a strong and fresh voice, but this is a thoughtful, interesting book.
Original review
A very slim novel that follows a young Korean girl poised on the brink of her quarter-life crisis and the enigmatic French artist who throws her various identities, and her various relationships, into relief.
There’s much to enjoy: the economical, ambiguous nature of the storytelling, the unusual setting, which is both instantly recognizable (off-season beach town) and clearly “other,” (a few miles from the border with North Korea), the evocative descriptions of fish, octopus, cold, family, the themes of foreignness, physical perfection and imperfection, and the central relationship, which might be a thwarted romance, and might be a girl in search of a missing father. It all builds to a satisfying, "surprising but inevitable" conclusion.
I couldn’t fully enjoy this book simply because the writing style is not quite my thing: ambiguous and elegant, yes, but also loaded with heavy metaphor. The dialogue is good in moments when the characters talk sideways about culture and the Frenchman consistently fails to understand, but I found it a bit portentous when they talked about art. All very, “you will not find what you are looking for here,” (cue soft, gloomy music).
All in all, I’m glad to have read this and it has given me plenty to think about. Dusapin is not quite my kind of writer, and I disagree that she writes in a strong and fresh voice, but this is a thoughtful, interesting book.
January 28, 2022
This is the first sentence of this beautiful novelette:
"Il est arrivé perdu dans un manteau de laine."
"Verloren in seinem Wollmantel stand er da."
"He arrived muffled up in a woolen coat."
"Llegó perdido en un abrigo de lana."
[Yan Kerrand] arrived lost in a woolen coat.
A first sentence needs to be meaningful, different, interesting and inviting to capture the reader. On the first page and all the pages to follow I was being invited and welcomed into the story of "Hiver à Sokcho." I was blown away.
Le Figaro said: "A first novel of unique beauty." Right on. Absolument ! I could have read this easily in one sitting but I wanted to save something for the next day. So I could still return to its beauty, the story and its unusualness.
This short novel could be suitable for a buddy or group read. Towards the end this was an emotional read for me, also at the end and after the ending. I was feeling all sorts of emotions!
(When I am reading I want beauty, I want suspense, I want to feel. I also enjoy books that make me think and ponder but I am not an intellectual reader. This book made me feel and think.)
After reading "Hiver à Sokcho" I really needed to talk about the ending with someone. Diane Barnes was an "emergency" contact I had in mind. She had read this novel earlier and signaled to another reader that she would like to discuss the ending when they were finished with reading. Diane also told me to let her know when I had finished the novel.
Thank you, Diane, for putting this book on my radar and for discussing the end. Here is the link to Diane's thoughts (on this book): https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
What a beautiful novelette.
Added on 28 Jan 2022:
I have a theory on the ending and am happy to share it via message. I'm still excited about the beauty and unusualness of this story.
Ebba
"Il est arrivé perdu dans un manteau de laine."
"Verloren in seinem Wollmantel stand er da."
"He arrived muffled up in a woolen coat."
"Llegó perdido en un abrigo de lana."
[Yan Kerrand] arrived lost in a woolen coat.
A first sentence needs to be meaningful, different, interesting and inviting to capture the reader. On the first page and all the pages to follow I was being invited and welcomed into the story of "Hiver à Sokcho." I was blown away.
Le Figaro said: "A first novel of unique beauty." Right on. Absolument ! I could have read this easily in one sitting but I wanted to save something for the next day. So I could still return to its beauty, the story and its unusualness.
This short novel could be suitable for a buddy or group read. Towards the end this was an emotional read for me, also at the end and after the ending. I was feeling all sorts of emotions!
(When I am reading I want beauty, I want suspense, I want to feel. I also enjoy books that make me think and ponder but I am not an intellectual reader. This book made me feel and think.)
After reading "Hiver à Sokcho" I really needed to talk about the ending with someone. Diane Barnes was an "emergency" contact I had in mind. She had read this novel earlier and signaled to another reader that she would like to discuss the ending when they were finished with reading. Diane also told me to let her know when I had finished the novel.
Thank you, Diane, for putting this book on my radar and for discussing the end. Here is the link to Diane's thoughts (on this book): https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
What a beautiful novelette.
Added on 28 Jan 2022:
I have a theory on the ending and am happy to share it via message. I'm still excited about the beauty and unusualness of this story.
Ebba
December 17, 2020
I picked this book up because it was one of the more affordable of the books I had not read that were nominated for The Mookse and the Gripes group's best fiction of 2020 poll here.
It is a short book that was not at all difficult to read in a single day, and it is told deceptively simply. Its narrator is working in a guest house in the town of Sokcho near the North/South Korean border. She has a Korean mother and a French father who she never knew. The story follows her tentative relationship with a French graphic novelist who is staying at her guest house and looking for inspiration. On the face of it not much happens, but there are plenty of hints that she is not saying everything she knows.
It is a short book that was not at all difficult to read in a single day, and it is told deceptively simply. Its narrator is working in a guest house in the town of Sokcho near the North/South Korean border. She has a Korean mother and a French father who she never knew. The story follows her tentative relationship with a French graphic novelist who is staying at her guest house and looking for inspiration. On the face of it not much happens, but there are plenty of hints that she is not saying everything she knows.
March 28, 2024
یک کتاب خوشخوان و ساده که میشه در طی یک روز خوند.
به احتمال زیاد این اخرای ماه رمضون چونکه سرم شلوغ میشه و من نمیتونم چند روز بدون کتاب خوندن دووم بیارم از این مجموعه ی نشر چشمه چندتارو انتخاب کردم که بخونم.
به احتمال زیاد این اخرای ماه رمضون چونکه سرم شلوغ میشه و من نمیتونم چند روز بدون کتاب خوندن دووم بیارم از این مجموعه ی نشر چشمه چندتارو انتخاب کردم که بخونم.
February 24, 2024
"A Winter in Sokcho" is a quiet novel, as quiet as snow falling on sand, like a knife gliding through the belly of a fugu, like a pen travelling across the blank surface of white paper.
It is a love story that is hardly a love story at all, and various themes unfold against its backdrop: the conflict between North and South Korea, loneliness, beauty mania, eating disorders.
The sparse plot is unfolded in clear sentences in which - like delicate inlays - splinters of madness and despair are embedded.
And although you experience everything, you remain strangely excluded from the story. Despite their vulnerability, the characters are unapproachable; they allow you to participate in their inner lives without allowing you to reach out to them.
It is an elegant but somewhat empty novel that builds up a lot of depth in its simplicity, but in which every question merely fades away as a banal echo.
The final sentence, however, is beautiful.
It is a love story that is hardly a love story at all, and various themes unfold against its backdrop: the conflict between North and South Korea, loneliness, beauty mania, eating disorders.
The sparse plot is unfolded in clear sentences in which - like delicate inlays - splinters of madness and despair are embedded.
And although you experience everything, you remain strangely excluded from the story. Despite their vulnerability, the characters are unapproachable; they allow you to participate in their inner lives without allowing you to reach out to them.
It is an elegant but somewhat empty novel that builds up a lot of depth in its simplicity, but in which every question merely fades away as a banal echo.
The final sentence, however, is beautiful.
March 11, 2023
Elisa Shua Dusapin's Winter in Sokcho, translated from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins is an absolute stunner of a read. Set in Sokcho, a South Koren tourist town on the border with North Korea during the winter down-time, tells the tale of a young French-Korean woman working as a receptionist in a guesthouse and her encounter with a French guest who is a cartoonist looking for solitude as he works on his next book. Not a lot happens in terms of plot and yet so much happens in mood, tone, setting and relationships. It's beautifully, exquisitely written. Line by line, phrase by phrase, word by word, Dusapin sketches a sense of Sokcho, the winter cold, the preparation of meals (a lot of gutting and cleaning of fish), the nuance of relationships and shared moments betwen the young woman, Kerrand (the visiting cartoonist), her mother, her work colleagues at the guest house.
This book is revealing through a kind of not-telling. In these restrained between moments that aren't overworked with unnecessary imagery or metaphor we experience so much about alientation and the difficulty of seeing ourselves let alone seeing others and meaningfully connecting with them. The cartoonist struggles with his art to cut through and see; through his art and struggle the central character starts to see herself and her environment a little differently.
I admire Dusapin's ability to render scenes and moments with such deft and light touches. Not a moment of overwriting, yet she establishes a vibrant sense of place through this distinctive pared back voice.
There's imagery throughout of visceral cutting, especially relating to food preparation. For me this sepaks to the difficulty of cutting through and connecting. But perhaps also conveys the necessary violence of any art that seeks to cut through. There's a current of alienation throughout and yet a quiet, dignified refusal to give in to that malise; the narrator keeps looking and finding meaning in unexpected, even banal moments. Dusapin's prose cuts through to the essence of things and relationships and in the process provides opportunity to see and be seen a little differently, even if just for a moment. Dusapin doesn't give us any big revelations. In fact, you find yourself asking what is it that I'm seeing here, in these moments of intimacy (including with self).
There's an arresting image of the narrrator preparing a meal of Fish (fugu) and needing to take care with removing the various organs without piercing them. There's the imagery of eviseration and cutting: "I tried again, using a heavier knife. A sharp crack. I made an incision in the skin, pulled it back in a single movement along the curve of the abdomen, plunged the blade into the flesh and exposed the viscera. Like cutting into a ripe persimmon".
She continues: "I grated some radish, prepared the dressing of rice vinegar and soy sauce, and selected a large ceramic platter. Mother-of-pearl inlay, cranes flying. I arranged the pieces of fugu on it. So delicately and feathery,they seemed scarcely more substantial than air. You could see the mother-of-pearl inlay through them. I'd have liked to show it to my mother".
There's so much going on here, it's also fascinating in terms of its relationship to the cartoonist and his art. For me this novel is just like this beautfifully prepared dish of fugu. It's also deadly and double-edged. The final few pages open up a good few reading possibilities that I'm still thinking about. The narrator is turning the pages of Kerran's sketchbook:
"The frames were huge, blown up. No words. The bird seemed old, one-legged, silver feathered, a thing of beauty. Water spurted from its beak, a river, the river feeding into the ocean. I turned the pages."
As I turned the pages of Winter in Sokcho I was riveted, enveloped by its wonderfully crafted mood. I encountered a thing of beauty. I'm eager to now read Dusapin's The Pachinko Parlour.
This book is revealing through a kind of not-telling. In these restrained between moments that aren't overworked with unnecessary imagery or metaphor we experience so much about alientation and the difficulty of seeing ourselves let alone seeing others and meaningfully connecting with them. The cartoonist struggles with his art to cut through and see; through his art and struggle the central character starts to see herself and her environment a little differently.
I admire Dusapin's ability to render scenes and moments with such deft and light touches. Not a moment of overwriting, yet she establishes a vibrant sense of place through this distinctive pared back voice.
There's imagery throughout of visceral cutting, especially relating to food preparation. For me this sepaks to the difficulty of cutting through and connecting. But perhaps also conveys the necessary violence of any art that seeks to cut through. There's a current of alienation throughout and yet a quiet, dignified refusal to give in to that malise; the narrator keeps looking and finding meaning in unexpected, even banal moments. Dusapin's prose cuts through to the essence of things and relationships and in the process provides opportunity to see and be seen a little differently, even if just for a moment. Dusapin doesn't give us any big revelations. In fact, you find yourself asking what is it that I'm seeing here, in these moments of intimacy (including with self).
There's an arresting image of the narrrator preparing a meal of Fish (fugu) and needing to take care with removing the various organs without piercing them. There's the imagery of eviseration and cutting: "I tried again, using a heavier knife. A sharp crack. I made an incision in the skin, pulled it back in a single movement along the curve of the abdomen, plunged the blade into the flesh and exposed the viscera. Like cutting into a ripe persimmon".
She continues: "I grated some radish, prepared the dressing of rice vinegar and soy sauce, and selected a large ceramic platter. Mother-of-pearl inlay, cranes flying. I arranged the pieces of fugu on it. So delicately and feathery,they seemed scarcely more substantial than air. You could see the mother-of-pearl inlay through them. I'd have liked to show it to my mother".
There's so much going on here, it's also fascinating in terms of its relationship to the cartoonist and his art. For me this novel is just like this beautfifully prepared dish of fugu. It's also deadly and double-edged. The final few pages open up a good few reading possibilities that I'm still thinking about. The narrator is turning the pages of Kerran's sketchbook:
"The frames were huge, blown up. No words. The bird seemed old, one-legged, silver feathered, a thing of beauty. Water spurted from its beak, a river, the river feeding into the ocean. I turned the pages."
As I turned the pages of Winter in Sokcho I was riveted, enveloped by its wonderfully crafted mood. I encountered a thing of beauty. I'm eager to now read Dusapin's The Pachinko Parlour.
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