It was a review in the NYT of a recent book by this author that took me to this one. I hadn’t heard of this author before and know little about her, but I did read that her mother is Korean and that her French father left Korea before she was born. This book is a novella set in South Korea very near the border with North Korea in a beach town that is almost empty in the winter. The unnamed narrator is a young woman who returned after college to be with her boyfriend and her mother who is a fishmonger. As in the case of the author, the narrator’s French father left Korea before she knew him. She has taken a job in a small dilapidated hotel where she does most of the work, including cooking. The kind elderly owner hasn’t made changes since the 1950s.
The story begins with the arrival of a middle-aged French graphic novelist who is looking for a location for the last novel in a series set in various places. Because he does not speak Korean, care for him falls to our narrator who has an imperfect command of French. They take outings together, including into the DMZ, as he determines whether Sokcho will inspire him.
The narrator describes the uncertainty facing the people waiting for an end to the war and they are in limbo, “we’re on a knife-edge, it could all give way at any moment.” The narrator herself is at a juncture in her life. Her connection to her boyfriend is tenuous and there’s nothing to keep her in Sokcho except her mother. She hopes for more attention from Kerrand. At first he hardly sees her, “But then I’d felt his hard, physical gaze cut into me, showing me my unfamiliar self, that other part of me, over there, on the other side of the world.” Ultimately, though, he doesn’t bring her into his world, he uses her eyes so he can see her world.
The weather was so frigid and the infrastructure so fragile that some pipes in the hotel were frozen, making the room where the narrator lived uninhabitable. The narrator’s mother worries she doesn’t eat enough but she sometimes eats so much, it’s as if she is drunk. When Kerrand insisted on working, rather than showing her his work, she intones that there’s nothing for his hero in Sokcho, and he will not succeed. Kerrand shuts himself away until he finishes his work.
We are left to wonder how much of the book is autobiographical, and whether the author identifies with both the narrator who wants to connect to the European side of herself as well as with the European author who must isolate himself enough to complete his work. The author successfully creates a disconcerting atmosphere by setting it in a vacation spot in the off-season and very close to the DMZ from a civil war that divided people and created a frighteningly autocratic country. I was impressed by the author’s ability to put me into such an alien, disconcerting world, and of course, I was happy to get back to my own.
Elisa Shua Dusapin, Winter in Sokcho, Open Letter, 2021, 154 pages (I read the kindle version). Available in the public library.