A review of Winter in Sokcho (or the book that made me want to read again)
I have a weird relationship with reading.
For starters, I do it for my degree (I am currently a third-year Lit student). I also have a lot of my creative passions tied up with reading. Article-writing requires a lot of research, even for opinion-based things (like this review), where I throw my ideas out into the void and hope someone is there to hear their faint echo.
This is one that I hope sticks, like a horrid earworm. I hope at least one person who reads this decides to read that one book that one girl online recommended. That one book, in question, is Winter in Sokcho, the debut novel by Elisa Shua Dusapin and translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins.
As a passion, reading has fallen to the wayside. However, in the long list of forgotten hobbies — crochet classes, YouTube tutorials on how to paint like my hair-twin Bob Ross, and the God awful month I spent trying to learn how to basket-weave aged 11 — reading has always been what I return to. I think a lot of people have a complicated relationship with reading. I describe it as a courtship dance. A slow dance, a precarious hanging-balance of endless steps and concentration. Where every book you pick up needs to be a five-star life-changer, or it’s not worth it.
I, for one, struggle to keep up with trends, especially lit trends. I find myself drowning in the top-20 lists and read-a-thon staples that pile up as the days go on. My TBR (to be read) pile only seems to get more overwhelming to even attempt to take a weak stab at. I find it disorientating trying to navigate through the sea of books that catch my attention.
Usually, against all proverbial advice, I judge books by their covers. And the cover art of my edition drew me in.
Designed by Luke Bird, the cover art is a snapshot of a beach. A perfect postcard. I think the book is deceptively layered too. Much like the unnamed protagonist, behind the veneer of a soft-toned pink is a story. A story that, as you uncover more of it, begins to wrench itself into your psyche. Dusapin’s prose merges the world of Sokcho with the liminal space all good books aim to seat their readers in. An enamouring world. Every page and every line read as if a long car drive. Moving slowly along a highway and fragments of light dancing between your eyelashes.
No one says her name, no one says thank you, no one listens. This is the life of Dusapin’s nameless narrator. As all ruminating and artful reads do, our story centres around a protagonist adrift. Much like the lonely fish in the isolated town of Sokcho, a usually popular spot in the summer. Off-season, the tourist destination has dried up as the cold chill of winter sets in. The fishing town is listless, lulled by the harsh wind of the winter season.
Dusapin’s debut novel follows our unnamed narrator. She returns back to her dead-end hometown by the sea after university in Seoul. Her days are spent working alongside the grouchy hotel owner Old Park as the guesthouse cook and receptionist. Living in one of the dingy hotel rooms, she has a thankless job in a thankless town. The days move like wading through water, clothes draped on their backs heavy with the weight of the day. Languid and effete, her life is a series of options and opportunities drowned out by passing tides. A boyfriend and relationship heading towards a foggy and uncertain destination.
But, there is a mysterious arrival at the small resort. A new guest. A foreign visitor, Yan Kerrand — french. The young woman with dual nationality (both French and Korean) is interested in the comic artist’s choice to visit Sokcho in winter. Since that is the least appealing season to visit.
The town is in a soluble, suffocating in its culture and dissolving into the unremarkable stench of fish and guts in pales. Sokcho is a town submerged. Floating in its own world during the slow months of winter. Surrounded by the sloshing of the boats bringing the fresh catch-of-the-day to the bustling market. The streets are drowning. The town awaits the impending sink. The young woman seems to be holding her head above water, but her feet are violently kicking beneath the surface.
“A milder breeze was blowing at the beach. The waves broke unevenly, hiccoughing. Seagulls poked their beaks in the sand, prancing about to avoid me. Except for one with a limp. I chased after it until it flew off. I thought they looked undignified when they weren’t in flight.”
There is life within these pages. A certain beauty is obtained in this book. A town preserved in crystalised snow, delicately hanging in the balance and slowly thawing. Snowflakes melting in a series of laconic sentences. Brisk and brusque conversations between the intriguing Frenchman and our narrator ensue. Bursting from the pages within this book are eloquently translated lines from french by Higgins. Body dysmorphia intermingles and weaves into the heart of the story. The cycles of purging, gorging and scrutinising, wriggle into the skin. The story departs in these short passages into a deeper part of the ocean surrounding Sokcho, the cultural depths to wade through.
The narrative becomes murky as the narrator falls further into sleepless nights where the mornings merge with the night sky. In these moments, the novel unearths its true level of depth, aside from the overt mystery. Beneath the blankets of snow around the nothing people and even more nothing town the understanding of oneself is found. The novel does not try to answer questions. Instead, the narrative takes a fancy to an idea, lets it float for a while and lets it go.
Obsidian and obscure. That is how I would describe the relationship the narrator has with her own body. It becomes a unique plot of its own. In her view of herself, we see the strain of all her relationships. The pain of growing detachment and the sorrow involved in the unsaid. The novel makes you want to reach into its pages and pull out the sticky ink of dyspathy lingering in every sentence as the narrator prods herself verbally. In every passing exchange with her mother, in particular, there is an anticipation. That the morphing narrative will soon claim new insecurity to painfully propel into the reader’s sympathetic and unwitting hands. The body of this book is of a sinister noirish kind. The biting chill of a world smushed into slushed ice under the boots of people in the fish market.
Dusapin creates a story that comforts and constricts. The short novel tip-toes along with tendrils of time. Winter in Sokcho balances effortlessly between weighted descriptions of intimacy, vulnerability and anonymity. The two leads and their growing connection to each other, unfolding more about themselves in the process, draws you in. And along with this investment is a love for a city and, for me at least, reading.
In the flickering descriptions of glances and glimpses of the ordinary lives of people is a small town. A lonely town. Past the buoyant borders that leave it disconnected and distant to its history and future. A ghost town. One filled with looming spectres of the past. Duspain’s novel presents Sokcho and the story within it shadowed in the cold of winter and memory. In the speck of the eye, both a lost town and a lost love of books become clearer.
Winter in Sokcho is a book that makes you yearn. For spring, for warmth, for flowers. The kind that grows from grains of soil, filtering through your fingertips as easily as the pages do. As a debut novel, the book resonates. It feels like a short walk in December and sticks with you like the cold twinge on your nose, its presence ingrained even after you warm yourself up. Dusapin’s tender hand encroaches through the words and, with no need for assurance, takes hold of your own in this book.
Just as the narrator is enraptured by the seamless sketches Kerrand leaves in the wastepaper bin, Winter in Sokcho pulls the reader below the surface. The deeper below the oncoming dark waves we fall, we find a story of undeniable colour. Palpable as a chokehold of water in the lungs, this book is filled with salt water. Acrid and asphyxiating, every second of this read envelopes you into a current that washes away and comes back in full force.
From the scintillatingly short descriptions of the fish market, the trudging boots of along the walkways, the icy rooms in the hotel, there is a searing profundity within them. Selectively and skilfully crafted, the acute sting of each sentence leave marks and impressions behind. In the pointed and caustic lay the authentic. Carefully traced is a land, a severed limb of northern South Korea.
It is within both the design and structure of the novel that the authentic and natural are centred. Captured beautifully within this book is the normal, the undistorted in all its spartan unostentatiousness. Chipped and jagged. The book and its narrator are not simply raw here. They are unornamented, pictured without the need of a delectable and prepossessing frame.
I mentioned that Winter in Sokcho feels like a hand-hold, and yet, it is a desperate squeeze before unlatching. A grip beneath the passing waves, a clutch in the unknown depths of the sea, the self and Sokcho. But it releases, it frees you. In more ways than one. It is a novel that remains with you after you put it down. A ghost, a spectre, just like the town it is set in. I hope to read another work of Dusapin’s for this reason. Where I am sure that, once again, she can take hold of my hand and guide me in this dance of holding on and letting go.
“The clothes started to turn in the machine, heavy with water. A dull thud. Rising and falling. Heavy. Rising and falling again. Spinning, tumbling faster and faster. Swirling to form a whirlpool, a vortex smashing up against the glass door. The sound of the machine faded to silence. Not for long. A few seconds at the most. And then the sound picked up again.”
