Name: mara henderson's review of Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin
Item: Winter in Sokcho
Rating: 4
Author: mara henderson

Elisa Shua Dusapin

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.

Winter in Sokcho

Julia Briganti

Michelle Smyth 

mara henderson

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.

Tsamarah

CW: slight spoiler, ED, daddy issues

"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. I wanted more of it. I wanted to live through his ink, to bathe in it. I wanted to be the only one he saw. And all he could say was he liked the way I saw things."

This one is for the girls who have daddy issues and eating disorders; we all sometimes dream about an old french dude to sexually fantasize about. 

The ending was abrupt, but the whole narrative was very alluring; a book you should bring on a winter vacation.

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.

Athiyya adristi

Thing for sure, I'd say it's a heaven made.




'Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real. They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it’s all fake, we’re on a knife-edge, it could all give way any moment. We’re living in limbo. In a winter that never ends.'

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 haven’t stopped thinking about it since i finished. i could see the film in my head so clearly as i was reading. there was a heaviness in my chest but in a good way and i could feel the longing under my skin; subtly, but the itch was there and it was welcomed. i’m always amazed by writers who can capture so much with such succinct and precise writing.  

melanie beltran

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.

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

not much of a plot, just vibes. i liked it alot  

༺ kat ༻

kaitlan

Winter in Sokcho reads like a short story, or a poem. It is haunted by an uneasy simplicity, moved less by plot points and more by tiny, broken, intimate, jarring details. 

In their bin, two condoms, packaging from a night-time face cream, mandarin peelings.

A spider scuttled into view and started to run up his leg, but he made no move to brush it away.

I protested again and then I let him carry on. I wanted someone to desire me.

The reading experience for me was less of a journey; more like inhabiting a moment in time I was not supposed to inhabit. A few attempts to describe this moment: Like when a knife is slipping. Like when you're about to throw up but the vomit hasn't reached your throat yet. Like when you want to say something, and you're heart begins pounding because you're about to, but then the moment passes and you can't say anything anymore and so you realize your heart was pounding for nothing, and now no one will ever know what you wanted to say- perhaps not even yourself. 

Within this space of malaise (yes, I think that’s the book in one word), Dusapin weaves commentary on artificiality/pretense, the state of "forgotten" war in Korea, women('s bodies), eating, daughterhood, cosmopolitanism. Basically I think my Korean film class should read this book.

It reminded me of Lee Chang-Dong's Burning, and is probably worth a re-read, as soon as I can recover from this feeling of somehow needing to throw up, and not knowing why.

Jeremy Wang

a friend described this book as “living in a moment where you don’t belong”, which is probably better than i can ever describe it. i quite liked the languid pace and sparse voice and scene selection, but the best moments came when the author carefully narrowed the focus on particular items: pufferfish flesh, used brushes and paper, a bloated body on a kitchen floor. side note: i love “sentences” that are just adjectives + noun. 

a disquieting character portrait with fascinating psychology that touches subtly on broader social questions relating to marriage, massive urbanization, and war. i really enjoyed it!

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

Shona Tiger

Atmospheric, beautiful, very unsettling. And what on earth happened at the end?

Definitely a very underrated book.

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.

Siya S

Ehhh 2.5 stars, up to 3

I do like a somewhat melancholic, subtle story that makes my heart yearn for what I do not have. Sadly, this one's too subtle for me I couldn't grasp much from the pages. 

Nothing much happened here, not even the slightest bit of a character development ... it's about a girl in Sokcho who chose to live there by choice (seemed both trapped and content at the same time). She worked at a guesthouse and people around her always hinted something at her to pick up and improve her current state of living. This included going through a surgery to get better exposure to job oportunities in Seoul. 

Then there's a comic artist who stayed there for a while, trying to find inspirations for his new book. While we could feel something was there, alas, nothing much happened between them. 

Again, nothing much happened in this book. But to my surprise, it's not depressing. It's just how it was for people in Sokcho, caught between to Koreas, stuck in time.

maggie

a story of longing placed in such a vacant space. i enjoyed the undercurrents of unease that seeped into this story, the casual cruel nature of it all - it made it unyieldingly realistic and painful and an amazing read. shoutout to arden for reading this one with me <33

 is usually described as a book where nothing happens—which just makes it align with what i like to read. more than the plot, i was more interested in how the author communicated loneliness and alienation from a place, a cultural identity, a body. i wasn't too keen on learning more about the cartoonist character, though of course i understand that his role wasn't written to be likable, but to represent how tourists often carry with them a colonist mindset—whether consciously or not.

what i choose to hold onto was the lovely prose. the description of the landscape was sparse, allowing you to feel the weight of loneliness that hangs in the air. i especially liked the nuances of the narrator's relationship with her mother, too—and how this ultimately shapes how she regards her self & her body.

winter in sokcho is usually described as a book where nothing happens—which just makes it align with what i like to read. more than the plot, i was more interested in how the author communicated loneliness and alienation from a place, a cultural identity, a body. i wasn't too keen on learning more about the cartoonist character, though of course i understand that his role wasn't written to be likable, but to represent how tourists often carry with them a colonist mindset—whether consciously or not.

what i choose to hold onto was the lovely prose. the description of the landscape was sparse, allowing you to feel the weight of loneliness that hangs in the air. i especially liked the nuances of the narrator's relationship with her mother, too—and how this ultimately shapes how she regards her self & her body.

Becca W

Not much plot or character development, overall a forgettable story. I don’t know if I didn’t pick up on symbolism or some intended theme, but not my thing.

Michelle Smyth &
Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin

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Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin