“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.”
Originally published in French in 2016, “Winter in Sokcho” by Elisa Shua Dusapin received critical acclaim globally for its use of language, its exploration of loneliness and human complexity, and its unique, immersive setting. In 2021, Open Letter Books, URochester’s press focused on publishing literature in translation, published the English edition translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. In 2024, the novel was adapted into a film by director Koya Kamura.
The novel opens on a guest house in Sokcho, South Korea, a beach town close to the Korean demilitarized zone. The town thrives in the summer and warmer months, when tourists flock to the beaches and enjoy the seafood, but in the winter, the town is desolate, lonely, and isolated.
We follow an unnamed woman of French-Korean descent who looks different from the community around her. She mans the front desk and the kitchen of the guest house, combining the seafood from her mother’s market stall with South Korean cuisine. She lives her life going through the motions: making breakfast, checking in guests, making lunch, calling her long-distance boyfriend, manning the desk, making dinner.
But everything changes when French graphic novelist Yan Kerrand checks into the guest house. He asks her to show him around the town, and while she insists there is nothing to see, she agrees — and so begins our story of longing, battling social standards, and a relationship that oversteps the boundary between friendship and romance.
Our narrator becomes enraptured with Kerrand, the drawings left on his desk, his determination to reject local cuisine, and she cannot pull herself away. She finds herself thinking of him when he is not there, spying on him through the crack of his door, and adapting her cooking so that he might finally taste her food.
Meanwhile, the figure of her mother and her estranged father loom in the background. Her mother who wants her to conform to Korean standards of beauty and marriage. Her father is out of the picture, yet influences her every move and how the town perceives her.
What follows is a profound exploration of female desire, of the want to be understood and seen, which culminates in what could be argued to be a coming of age story, leaving our narrator alone again, changed, yet simultaneously the same.
This is a book that I will be thinking about forever. Immediately after I finished it, I wanted to pick it up again, to parse through the language, dissect the clues our author gives us, and understand our narrator in the way she believes no one can. Our narrator has a strong desire to be seen by someone which leads to an obsessive relationship with Kerrand. I found her complexity, her fixation on him and his drawings, to be extremely well thought out. From the detailed descriptions of the town to the eeriness of Kerrand’s drawings, the writing of this book is lyrical, creepy at times, and complements its focus on loneliness.
This novel combines the formal elements of dynamic characters and slow-building plot points with the stylistic elements of precision of language and translation to create an emotional, thought-provoking, visceral read, one that I cannot recommend highly enough.
