Winter In Sokcho Vk

[Kristeen Cheek]

Dusapins debut novel depicts a young biracial Korean woman living and working in a small guesthouse in Sokcho, South Korea, a beach town 60 km from the North Korean border. When a mysterious middle-aged Frenchman named Yan Kerrand arrives, off-season, in the midst of the winter slump, the woman is intrigued. She has never met her father, a Frenchman who left her mother after a brief affair, but has studied French language and literature in school and dreams of traveling to the country someday. The novel unfolds in brief vignettelike chapters that reveal the unnamed woman's daily life. After work, she visits her mother, who works in the fish market and is renowned for her delicious octopus soondae. Despite pressure to marry, the young woman is ambivalent about her long-distance relationship with her boyfriend, Jun-oh, an aspiring model in Seoul. Dusapin's novel avoids clichs in the woman's developing relationship with the lonely foreigner, who turns out to be an internationally renowned graphic novelist looking for inspiration for a new book. The woman observes the man and never looks at him as a savior or stereotypical lover. Instead, Dusapin depicts a fiercely intelligent, independent woman who longs to be seen clearly for who she is and the choices she has made, including leaving Seoul to help her aging mother. Higgins' exquisite translation from the French original is a pleasure to read. The descriptions of daily life in the titular town are beautiful, elliptical, and fascinating, from the fish markets near the beach to soju-drenched dinners in local bistros to a surreal glimpse of a museum on the DMZ. Dusapin, who like her protagonist is of French and Korean heritage, has won several awards for her novel in Switzerland, where she lives, including the Prix Robert-Walser and the Prix Rgine Desforges.

The unnamed narrator has returned after her studies in Seoul to her hometown of Sokcho to look after her fishmonger mother (who potentially has a health issue). She somewhat languidly imagined herself continuing her studies in France, since she speaks the language and her father (who absented himself from the family before she was born) was French. Meanwhile, however, she seems stuck but not unhappy in a job as a chambermaid and cook at a small hotel, in her half-hearted, not entirely satisfactory relationship with her boyfriend who dreams of a modelling or idol career in Seoul, in her repetitive, not entirely honest conversations with her mother.

Then a mysterious stranger descends upon out-of-season Sokcho. A middle-aged French illustrator (BD creator) appears at the hotel, which is virtually closed during the winter. Sokcho in summer is quite the tourist magnet, with its beaches, hot springs, nature reserves and viewing platform of the border with North Korea, but in winter it is a ghost town. The author does a great job of conveying the cold and frozen atmosphere, the distinctive fishy smells, the wind blowing through the streets, the fading, rotten atmosphere of a former pier-side attraction.

This is a melancholy novel of isolation, the unbridgeable gap between people and everything that is not spoken out loud, everything that we are reluctant to admit even to ourselves. An elegant tour de force also about the borders we artificially raise between people, cultures, countries.

Winter in Sokcho Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis tohelp you understand the book. This study guide contains the following sections:Plot SummaryChaptersCharactersSymbols and SymbolismSettingsThemes and MotifsStyles This detailed literature summary also contains Quotes and a Free Quiz onWinter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin.The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Dusapin, Elisa Shua. Winter in Sokcho. New York: Open Letter, 2021.

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. The narrator checks in a guest, an older Frenchman named Yan Kerrand from Normandy, and tells him about local attractions. It is winter, so the beach resort city is largely empty. After checking Kerrand in, the narrator goes to the fish market where her mother works. The narrator notes that people in Sokcho gossip about her because her father was a Frenchman who seduced her mother and abandoned her. That night, Kerrand does not come to the guest house for dinner, which the narrator always prepares. The following night, the narrator sleeps at her mother's house, and her mother chastises her for not yet being married. The narrator replies that she and her boyfriend, Jun-oh, will get engaged soon.

The next day, the narrator discovers the radiator in her room has broken, so she moves into a room next to Kerrand's. She feels disgusted when she passes Kerrand while wearing only her nightgown and realizes he must have seen her scar. The narrator goes to the public bath with her mother, who tells her she looks thin. Later, she speaks to Kerrand again. He asks about her future plans, and she says that she would like to see France. She does not tell him she feels she cannot leave her mother. That night, the narrator receives sexual text messages from Jun-oh. She touches herself while thinking of Kerrand on the other side of her bedroom wall.

The next day, the narrator and Kerrand walk along the beach. He compares the beach in Sokcho, with its sub-machine gun bunkers, to the beach in Normandy. The narrator tells him that it is different, because the beach in Normandy was the site of conflict long ago, whereas the beach in Sokcho is scarred by a conflict that is still occurring. She tells him that a tourist from Seoul was shot in the water the previous summer when she accidentally swam over the border into North Korea.

The narrator, her aunt, and her mother have a meal for Seollal. The narrator's mother prepares fugu (blowfish). She is the only fishmonger in the city with a special license to make it, as it can be poisonous if prepared incorrectly. The narrator's mother and aunt make comments about the narrator's physical appearance and the possibility of her having plastic surgery. The narrator overeats again, and she feels insecure when she passes Kerrand because is bloated.

The narrator prepares her mother's fugu recipe. She takes it to Kerrand's room but discovers he is already gone. He has left behind a sketchbook, which contains a drawing of a woman with a scar on her leg.

Read Great Things 2023 Categories: A book about an experience different than your own; A book that piques your curiosity; A book recommended by a Durham Tech staff member on the Library blog

I'm not too proud to admit it: Winter in Sokcho has an incredibly inviting physical design. The postcard-as-book-cover approach promises big feelings, but the generous use of white space inside offers plenty of contemplation between what ends up being a very sensual reflection on one's own romantic and professional destinies.

Elisa Shua Dusapin's writing, translated here by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, invites a lot of emotional interpretations about the narrator's motivations and curiosities. The reader is allowed inside the head of a woman who spends time during her tedious seaside hotel job getting to know a mysterious new visitor, but Dusapin's writing is abstract enough that it allows plenty of suspense about how these curiosities will resolve.

Specific Korean cultural rites and food are italicized throughout the book. The book is short, so I found that pausing to research specific terms and look up pictures to be a useful way of exploring the book.

The book left me with a feeling of longing and a reminder of why it is nice to travel in the winter to traditionally summer locales: it's quiet, the air is crisp, and there's always a lovely contrast when a place designed for summer tourism is explored in the winter months.

If you are interested in learning more about Korean cuisine and want a similarly light read, I recommend the graphic novel/cookbook Cook Korean! by Robin Ha and the tragic memoir Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner for further explorations of Korean heritage narratives that, in these examples, often intersect with cuisine.

Narrated by a twenty-four-year-old Franco-Korean woman, brought up by her mother after her French father had vanished without a trace, Winter in Sokcho is an eerie, bleak and addictively unsettling read.

Sokcho is like coastal towns the world over, and is reminiscent of Menton in the South of France, or Cadaqus in Spain, in the way what was once a fishing village by the sea is now over run by tourists in the summer, and empty in the winter. A Frenchman from Granville in Normandy arrives to stay in the run-down guest house where the young woman works, in the dead of winter. A prolific and successful comic book writer, he is researching and sketching his next work. She watches him surreptitiously as he draws in his room, and is strangely attracted to this elusive, intriguing man.

She finds herself doing things for him that she does for no one else, and is annoyed at herself, yet still does them. She accompanies him on sightseeing trips to the border with North Korea which is 60 km away; a Buddhist temple complex on the slopes of Naksan Mountain; and the bridge where a famous scene was filmed for the hit movie, First Love.

There are only a few other guests staying, including a young Japanese woman wrapped up in bandages who rarely leaves her room as she is recuperating from extensive cosmetic surgery. (Korea is known for being where you go to get your eyes widened.)

Her mother lives in the port and works in the guest house kitchen, and produces mouthwatering dishes of local delicacies. Their relationship is fractious. Her boyfriend, Jun-oh, leaves to go to model school in Seoul.

Winter in Sokcho is deftly translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. Imbued with a strange sense of abandonment, the spare language contrasts with the world of light and shadows that it conveys. If you are looking for translated fiction to lose yourself in, the kind of book that will thoroughly engage and transport you to another world, then read and relish Winter in Sokcho.

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