Name: Winter in Sokcho
Rating: 3.708333333333333 (108 reviews)
ISBN: 9781948830416

Elisa Shua Dusapin

As if Marguerite Duras wrote Convenience Store Woman--a beautiful, unexpected novel from a debut French-Korean author

Winter in Sokcho

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.

this took me one hour to read, but I can imagine neon making it into a three hour movie.

Regan Martin

I love the way Dusapin perfectly conveys the universal longing to be desired by someone with elegance; nothing more, nothing less.

Honorable mention for the beautiful cover.

chai

I love the way Dusapin perfectly conveys the universal longing to be desired by someone with elegance; nothing more, nothing less.

Honorable mention for the beautiful cover.

I like Dusapin’s writing because she breathes air into through her narrator’s thoughts. I don’t think I fully understood this book but I felt a lot of the tension, breathlessness, and restless feelings expressed. 

oscar-nominated cannes festival indie darling in book form

Grace M

Natalie

Its spare prose skillfully builds tension and evokes a desolate and wistful atmosphere. However, the same restraint makes unclear the "spark" of the central relationship, leaving the reader feeling minimally invested the novel's driving force.

Cait🪼

I desperately wanted to love this book but it was missing something integral...I enjoyed the monotone writing style but felt disconnected with the characters. The only person I related to slightly was the Frenchman, and that's probably because of how loosely he was written. 
The premise seemed interesting: North Korea, a mysterious man, and art! But it just didn't really deliver. The ending, especially, left me feeling...well, void. There wasn't any feeling at the end of the book...
Still, an interesting short read.

lexie

it was fun, I don't why it's fun but i love how she describe the food. i love that it's just vibes, no plot.

Ziggy

I love the eye-candy cover in Winter in Sockho, it kinda gave me the impression that this would be some sort of cheery novel (yes, I was wrong). The novel is short and I read it quite fast when I first got my hands on it. Before purchasing this, I also made sure to read a bunch of reviews, and they were all convincing.

Winter in Sokcho is quite subtle in expressing what is happening. During my first read, I couldn't really grasp what was happening because there seemed to be nothing happening. All I sensed was tensions between characters and that was it. After reading some explanations, it finally "clicked", and I decided to give it a try again.. The yearning of validation and the desire to be seen that the main narrator had to the French old man finally made sense. It conveyed a bittersweet implications of an absent father figure that led the main narrator attracted. It also implied several times about the unhealthy relationship between the narrator and her mother had, which was part of the toxic culture in Korean, where women are constantly pressured to meet certain body standards. Even the narrator's boyfriend affirmed it by expressing willingness to undergo surgeries if it could help his career.

This is the kind of novel that gets better when you reread it because you might have missed certain parts. Not because it was plot-heavy, but because of the subtlety that made it seem like nothing much happening. The characters felt distant and I didn't get enough of a grip on them, but after a while, I've come to understand the beauty of it. 

I love the eye-candy cover in Winter in Sockho, it kinda gave me the impression that this would be some sort of cheery novel (yes, I was wrong). The novel is short and I read it quite fast when I first got my hands on it. Before purchasing this, I also made sure to read a bunch of reviews, and they were all convincing.

Winter in Sokcho is quite subtle in expressing what is happening. During my first read, I couldn't really grasp what was happening because there seemed to be nothing happening. All I sensed was tensions between characters and that was it. After reading some explanations, it finally "clicked", and I decided to give it a try again.. The yearning of validation and the desire to be seen that the main narrator had to the French old man finally made sense. It conveyed a bittersweet implications of an absent father figure that led the main narrator attracted. It also implied several times about the unhealthy relationship between the narrator and her mother had, which was part of the toxic culture in Korean, where women are constantly pressured to meet certain body standards. Even the narrator's boyfriend affirmed it by expressing willingness to undergo surgeries if it could help his career.

This is the kind of novel that gets better when you reread it because you might have missed certain parts. Not because it was plot-heavy, but because of the subtlety that made it seem like nothing much happening. The characters felt distant and I didn't get enough of a grip on them, but after a while, I've come to understand the beauty of it. 

'People walking, ageless and faceless, leaving traces of colour behind them, faint imprints in the wet sand. Shades of yellow and blue haphazardly blended, as if by a hand discovering its power. One after another in the wind, they trod slowly out of the frames, the sea spreading beyond the beach, spilling over into the sky, an image with no lines, only the edges of the page to frame it. A place, but not a place. A place taking shape in the moment of conception and then dissolving. A threshold, a passage, where the falling snow joins the spray, where the snowflakes divide to evaporate and meet the sea.'

WINTER IN SOKCHO by Elisa Shua Dusapin, tr. by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, was a vivid novella, as if everything described on its pages are fresh with ink, only recently created, the image still at the forefront of memory. A young French-Korean woman balances on the precipice of resenting Korean society and Sokcho, while not knowing the other side of her identity until she meets a French graphic artist, whose relationship she has with is complicated. The story she narrates unfolds in atmospheric narrative, thoughts and imagery tangled in emotional disarray, arranged in scenes that are aimless but that seems to be the point, as there is no real conflict and plot thread that leads to an outcome. I suppose that is realistic considering it's real life; it often doesn't have the satisfying or dramatic end we expect it to. 

Alongside her personal journey, she describes and subtly criticises using vivid poetic imagery the lives of the people of Sokcho, who seem to accept their fate beneath the snow and frost, and do their best to live on in pretence of peace, even with the border — an acute reminder of the unfinished war — and the acres of forest behind their backs. She reveals the perceptions of beauty Korean society holds, the constant nagging from her mother for her to have surgery. She observes a girl who's had the surgery, living with bandaged body parts, almost in parallel with the haunt of the long scar on her thigh. The best parts were the food descriptions, which made my mouth water! I'm craving for Korean cuisines right now.

Despite being slow-paced, the thin volume was less daunting to tackle down, and it proved to be one of my highlights this year.

fairuza hanun

'People walking, ageless and faceless, leaving traces of colour behind them, faint imprints in the wet sand. Shades of yellow and blue haphazardly blended, as if by a hand discovering its power. One after another in the wind, they trod slowly out of the frames, the sea spreading beyond the beach, spilling over into the sky, an image with no lines, only the edges of the page to frame it. A place, but not a place. A place taking shape in the moment of conception and then dissolving. A threshold, a passage, where the falling snow joins the spray, where the snowflakes divide to evaporate and meet the sea.'

WINTER IN SOKCHO by Elisa Shua Dusapin, tr. by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, was a vivid novella, as if everything described on its pages are fresh with ink, only recently created, the image still at the forefront of memory. A young French-Korean woman balances on the precipice of resenting Korean society and Sokcho, while not knowing the other side of her identity until she meets a French graphic artist, whose relationship she has with is complicated. The story she narrates unfolds in atmospheric narrative, thoughts and imagery tangled in emotional disarray, arranged in scenes that are aimless but that seems to be the point, as there is no real conflict and plot thread that leads to an outcome. I suppose that is realistic considering it's real life; it often doesn't have the satisfying or dramatic end we expect it to. 

Alongside her personal journey, she describes and subtly criticises using vivid poetic imagery the lives of the people of Sokcho, who seem to accept their fate beneath the snow and frost, and do their best to live on in pretence of peace, even with the border — an acute reminder of the unfinished war — and the acres of forest behind their backs. She reveals the perceptions of beauty Korean society holds, the constant nagging from her mother for her to have surgery. She observes a girl who's had the surgery, living with bandaged body parts, almost in parallel with the haunt of the long scar on her thigh. The best parts were the food descriptions, which made my mouth water! I'm craving for Korean cuisines right now.

Despite being slow-paced, the thin volume was less daunting to tackle down, and it proved to be one of my highlights this year.

Gia Palamos

So careful, slow, and quiet. 🤍 Couldn’t stop reading it!

A limbo where to be the reader was to be a mote of dust in this story, existing so definitively inside the world to the point where the smells and the sounds, the textures and the exact pathway and density of light is eerily palpable, and yet as one exists in such close proximity to the narrator, she will move or even breathe and the dust will waft around this line of motion, never able to cling or grasp, its existence distorted by a rupture in inertia, and the images perceived also distorts, and you can get snapshots here and there, clear palatable snapshots, but not long enough for it to sink. The motion of the narration is simple but it's hard to fully get a hold of what's beyond the initial surface before it slips away, eel-like, shy in being unearthed. Everything is grey and dense and cold and thin. Like the comic being described, everything blurs. The inactivity is a rush of questions, pleas and searching in itself. It is limbo.

anarh

i wouldn’t have suspected this was in translation, whoa. i found myself musing a couple times that elisa shua dusapin’s prose reminded me of 

 by james salter—a little bit of that staccato, stationary kind of writing, where the descriptions are these tiny unmoving blinks. like clicking from image to image across a roll of film negatives. the narration in 

 stays focused only on snapshots, lingering without necessarily hovering, even at its most vivid and precise when talking about food and cooking, and when we do get motion, it’s with a sort of abstraction understandably more suited to particularities involving kerrand’s art, or the narrator’s relationship with eating/her mother/body image/how all three intersect. there’s a sense of only getting the afterimage of a landscape or emotion or theme that we’ll never see in full. like noticing multiple faded images superimposed on each other from accidental double exposure? that kind of vague there-ness.

the overall effect also brings to mind how it feels to watch a gobelins animated short, which is probably what made this book feel unexpectedly comforting. but my investment here was rooted in how the initial sense of comfort eventually evolved into heartache, until i’m left at the end with this feeling of needing to tear up—not cry, just tear up until i feel a small sting—yet without enough sensation available to fuel anything physiological. there’s just a degree of gentle emptiness. it’s an interesting paradox to feel from a story where, really, you can argue nothing happened. 

the narrator says in one of the later chapters that the people of sokcho live in limbo, in a winter that never ends, and credit where credit is due bc that’s how the story felt. short and bittersweet, limbic in that brevity, cold but only so that you feel the reader equivalent of rubbing your hands together yourself for warmth on a snowy evening. i liked it.

i wouldn’t have suspected this was in translation, whoa. i found myself musing a couple times that elisa shua dusapin’s prose reminded me of a sport and a pastime by james salter—a little bit of that staccato, stationary kind of writing, where the descriptions are these tiny unmoving blinks. like clicking from image to image across a roll of film negatives. the narration in winter in sokcho stays focused only on snapshots, lingering without necessarily hovering, even at its most vivid and precise when talking about food and cooking, and when we do get motion, it’s with a sort of abstraction understandably more suited to particularities involving kerrand’s art, or the narrator’s relationship with eating/her mother/body image/how all three intersect. there’s a sense of only getting the afterimage of a landscape or emotion or theme that we’ll never see in full. like noticing multiple faded images superimposed on each other from accidental double exposure? that kind of vague there-ness.

the overall effect also brings to mind how it feels to watch a gobelins animated short, which is probably what made this book feel unexpectedly comforting. but my investment here was rooted in how the initial sense of comfort eventually evolved into heartache, until i’m left at the end with this feeling of needing to tear up—not cry, just tear up until i feel a small sting—yet without enough sensation available to fuel anything physiological. there’s just a degree of gentle emptiness. it’s an interesting paradox to feel from a story where, really, you can argue nothing happened. 

the narrator says in one of the later chapters that the people of sokcho live in limbo, in a winter that never ends, and credit where credit is due bc that’s how the story felt. short and bittersweet, limbic in that brevity, cold but only so that you feel the reader equivalent of rubbing your hands together yourself for warmth on a snowy evening. i liked it.

Winter in Sokcho

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