Winter in Sokcho by French author Elisa Shua Dusapin is a beautiful story, wonderfully crafted with a deeper layer underneath.
Location: set in Sokcho, South Korea
Winter in Sokcho synopsis
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.
Book review
Winter in Sokcho by French author Elisa Shua Dusapin is a wonderful travel guide in the form of a novel. If you’re planning or considering visiting Sokcho in South Korea, then I highly recommend reading this book. It’s fun and it really gives you the feeling you’re out there exploring Sokcho.
You’ll read about the must-see places of Sokcho like Seoraksan National Park, Goseong Demilitarized Zone and Naksan Temple, and learn about Korean food and traditions, family expectations and what it feels like to live in a remote seaside town enclosed by mountains and sea.
The writing style is pleasant. The scenes are intriguing, especially those in which the visitor from France is working on his drawings. I feel like quoting all of them, but I won’t so you can experience them yourself. Just this one: “I pictured Kerrand, his fingers scurrying like spiders’ legs, his eyes travelling up, scrutinising the model, looking down at the paper again, looking back up to make sure his pen conveyed the truth of his vision, to keep her from vanishing while he traced the lines.”
The French artist is looking for perfection while our narrator is not looking for anything specific at all. The contrast makes for interesting conversations as she tries to understand him. A returning topic is the absence of women in the drawings, despite the many times she saw him draw one. He wants to be sure she is perfect before he fixes her by drawing her in ink, and she wonders what a woman has to be like to earn the right to appear alongside his character on paper.
He works with ink on paper, she and her mother handle ink from fish. When she pierces the ink sac and the octopus dish turns out greyish it is similar to how he blacks out his drawing of a woman. He is afraid of finishing because then he’d have no control over it anymore. So he searches for something that never ends and is all-encompassing. Is it common for people to long for that or do we only wish that upon others, to keep them with us, always? A man or woman for all time. An eternal book or a blog?
Winter in Sokcho is a beautiful story, wonderfully crafted with a deeper layer underneath. The pacing is good and the writing style (and/or very good translation!) fitting. It grabbed my attention from beginning till end and as I’m writing this I’m still pondering about the woman in ink. The book gives off this fairytale feeling like the story continues after we close the book. Even though there are no words left on paper, the characters live on without us, in their own isolated part of the world called Sokcho. Recommended!
Translated from French by Aneesa Higgins.
Interested?
You can get your copy of Winter in Sokcho from Amazon.
