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. Elisa Shua Dusapin’s voice is distinctive and unmistakable.Terse and sometimes staggeringly beautiful prose … Elisa Shua Dusapin. As she’s pulled into his vision and taken in by his drawings, she strikes upon a way to finally be seen.Īn 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. 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. 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. As if Marguerite Duras wrote Convenience Store Woman – a beautiful, unexpected novel from a debut French Korean author

Winter in sokcho elisa shua dusapin