Winter in Sokcho

‘What brings you to Sokcho in the dead of winter?’ 
’I needed peace and quiet.'
You’ve come to the right place,’ I laughed.

There are very few books which tend to linger not just in your mind long after you’ve read them, but also in the air around you. They constantly remind you of their existence with every breath you take, leaving you paralysed by their effect and a sense of longing to return to them so intense, that the boundaries between fiction and reality begin to collapse. Elisa Shua Dusapin’s debut book, Winter In Sokcho, is one such book, that took me a mere three hours to read, but its after effects will stay with me for a lifetime. The book was originally written in French and has now been translated and published in English by Daunt Books this year. I find myself lucky to have read this book during the dead of Delhi’s winter and letting it embrace me with its beguiling charm.

There is nothing complicated about the way Elisa writes or the way Aneesa Abbas Higgins has masterfully translated the book. The language is so simple and comforting, paradoxically nuanced yet made of sentences short and succinct, that one might mistake the author’s narrative to be too simplistic. It is, however, viscerally charged and complex, bringing the author’s literary brilliance to fore. "I literally made a film in my head to write this book. I constructed the novel as a series of sequences. I drew storyboards to help me visualise things. I wanted to create something concrete, something visual and sensual, rather than mental and intellectual," tells me Elisa, whose answers to my questions were also `translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. The book begins with ‘HE ARRIVED,’ a French comic illustrator named Yan Kerrand in a small and almost rundown guesthouse in the South Korean seaside town of Sokcho. Here, the young Korean woman of 24, whose voice and perspective drives the narrative, is helping the guest house owner, Park, run the place. The author never tells us the name of our narrator, but a few facts that one gathers about her are that her father was a Frenchman who had seduced her mother and vanished about 23 years ago, that she was a university student at Seoul before she came back to her hometown Sokcho, and that she has a rather complex relationship with her mother, her body, and will eventually have, with Kerrand.

The narrator and Kerrand’s relationship essentially propels the story. The ambiguity of their constant back and forth, along with the occasional familiarity of their silences, is deeply fascinating. One could question if the narrator sought the absent French father figure in Kerrand or Kerrand sought the woman he wishes to sketch perfectly, ‘a woman of all time’ as he says, in the narrator. Yet, none of these questions could truly answer and descrube the relationship that develops between the two, that cannot, quite simply, be labelled love, as the narrator also remarks herself. While these two characters are tinged with varied degrees of loneliness, which also percolates into the narrative sometimes, there are fragile moments of warmth within their indescribable bond, a relationship that goes beyond language and culture.

The author also uses this relationship to delve into the psyche of the narrator and her relationship with herself. "I wrote Winter in Sokcho between the ages of 17 and 21, an age when one is particularly sensitive to questions of belonging, of creating a sense of self," reveals Elisa, and these notions are very apparent in the book’s underlying thematic concerns. For instance, the author exceptionally depicts a young woman’s complicated relationship with her body and her mother. The scenes of the narrator stuffing herself with food to manage her feelings, or her mental exhaustion with taking care of her mother even though she could easily move away and make something of herself, capture the the contours of a young woman bogged down by the society she so urgently wants to escape, and her longing to find belonging.