Henk's Reviews > Winter in Sokcho

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.