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. 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. 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. There is a deep undercurrent of ideas accruing inside this novel that exists like the dust on butterfly wings.

Like the town in winter, the whole novel reads like a breath held and waiting, with Aneesa Abbas Higgins translation lovingly rendering Dusapin’s prose in all it’s compulsive and eerie beauty. 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. ‘ Oozing Winter and fish, Sokcho waited,’ the unnamed narrator of Elisa Shua Dusapin’s haunting debut, Winter in Sokcho, tells us, ‘ That was Sokcho. *WINNER of the 2021 National Book Awards for Translated Literature!* Elisa Shua Duspain’s voice is distinctive and unmistakable.

As she’s pulled into his vision and taken in by his drawings, she strikes upon a way to finally be seen.Īn 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. 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. 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.

One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North’s watchtowers. It’s winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. As if Marguerite Duras wrote Convenience Store Woman - a beautiful, unexpected novel from a debut French Korean author

Winter in sokcho elisa shua dusapin