When a mysterious middle-aged Frenchman named Yan Kerrand arrives, off-season, in the midst of the winter slump, the woman is intrigued. Free UK p&p over £15.An atmospheric novel about an independent young woman in a South Korean beach town.ĭusapin's 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.
Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, is published by Daunt (RRP £9.99). Oiled with a brooding tension that never dissipates or resolves, Winter in Sokcho is a noirish cold sweat of a book. Identity is in crisis, with the toweringly obvious symbol of a land divided hanging over it all.ĭusapin’s terse sentences are at times staggeringly beautiful, their immediacy sharply and precisely rendered from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins: “the rain hammered down, the sea rising beneath it in spikes like the spines of a sea urchin”. Body dysmorphia abounds, from the narrator’s frequent cycles of overeating and purging to the hopeless quest for perfection manifested in the swollen, bandaged face of a female hotel guest who has undergone plastic surgery. These brief conversational asides contrast with the book’s omnipresent viscerality: the narrator’s mother, an expert at cooking the potentially deadly fugu or pufferfish, has a fish market stall where scales and blood are routinely trod underfoot, like the painful collective memories of a divided country. For the narrator, the contrast with Sokcho seems stark: “You had to be born here, live through the winters. She has studied French he talks of Maupassant, Monet and the “grey and dense” light of his native Normandy. Hair combed to one side.” While he invites the narrator to assist him in his search for ‘authentic’ Korea, he is curiously averse to her offers of local cuisine, preferring western takeaways, and constantly citing an aversion to “spicy” food.
Kerrand is old enough to be her unknown French father. The unexpected arrival at the hotel of a guest from France, a comic-book artist called Kerrand, stirs a frenzy in the young woman, in whom he takes a sporadic but intense interest. Terse and sometimes staggeringly beautiful prose … Elisa Shua Dusapin.
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