A grip beneath the passing waves, a clutch in the unknown depths of the sea, the. Elisa Shua Dusapin’s voice is distinctive and unmistakable. I mentioned that Winter in Sokcho feels like a hand-hold, and yet, it is a desperate squeeze before unlatching. Imbued with a strange sense of abandonment, the spare language contrasts with the world of light and shadows that it conveys. 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. Winter in Sokcho is deftly translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. As she’s pulled into his vision and taken in by his drawings, she strikes upon a way to finally be seen. It is winter, so the beach resort city is largely empty. The narrator checks in a guest, an older Frenchman named Yan Kerrand from Normandy, and tells him about local attractions. 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. Winter in Sokcho is narrated by an unnamed 24-year-old woman who lives and works at a guest house in the resort city of Sokcho on South Korea's border with North Korea. 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.
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