Enter Winter in Sokcho, Elisa Shua Dusapin’s luminous, icy debut
Illustration by Anna Webb
CN: contains references to disordered eating
Hiver à Sokcho (Winter in Sokcho) examines the fraught existence of its unnamed protagonist as she struggles to keep her head above the roiling waters of her coastal hometown. Now working listlessly as a receptionist in a run-down hotel, she studied Korean and French literature at university in Seoul, but has since moved back to Sokcho to be closer to her caring but complicated mother and self-important boyfriend.
The story opens with Yan Kerrand’s arrival at the hotel. A successful graphic novelist from France, he comes to Sokcho seeking artistic inspiration - an uncomfortably exploitative dynamic that also plays out between Kerrand and the protagonist, as he charges her with helping him to discover an “authentic” Korea. It rapidly becomes apparent that his interest in Korean culture is limited to how it might best serve his next writing project; as his wastepaper bin piles higher with boxes of takeaway pastries, he repeatedly refuses to try any local food. Plastic surgery is a running theme in the novel - the protagonist’s boyfriend contemplates undergoing a cosmetic procedure to further his modelling career, and one of the guests arrives at the hotel with a face swathed in post-op bandages - but it’s Kerrand who is strikingly superficial. He neglects to engage in the lives of others; after asking the protagonist if she has a boyfriend, he rapidly loses interest in her personal life. He perceives the places he visits as sites of self-discovery, delivering hazy, monochrome renditions of these locations to his French audience, as seen through the lens of an egocentric protagonist he seems to model on himself.
Kerrand speaks about France in the wistful watercolour shades of a Monet painting, but his comics are all black-and-white, which strikes the protagonist as a deeply inappropriate style for a place as “colourful” as her hometown. Sokcho, by way of contrast to Kerrand’s native Normandy or to his works of art, is vital in neon brightness, fishy effluvia and barbed-wire spangled beaches. Dusapin excels in describing it, so that the city - with its alleyways of invisible ice and recurring cast of locals - becomes a character in its own right.
The protagonist, however, exists in slippery tension with reality, observing her surroundings from a distance with a keen attention that she rarely applies to her own interiority. She seems to occupy a liminal space, at times melting into the set pieces of the hotel or the city streets as a fly on the wall, before briefly directing her excruciatingly perceptive gaze to her slowly-numbing fingers or distended belly. Over the course of the novel, her body takes on an amorphous quality, swelling after she binges during meals with her mother before shrinking as another character observes how slim she has become. Ill at ease in herself, she becomes increasingly fascinated by glimpses she catches of the enigmatic, alluring woman who appears again and again in Kerrand’s discarded sketches, and whose identity threatens to coalesce with her own.
Having toyed with the interplay of art, writing and identity throughout, Hiver à Sokcho ends with a suitably mind-bending conclusion that fuses sea with snow, ink with flesh, and illustration with prose. Dusapin thus prompts us to examine critically how we perceive and depict ourselves, each other and our surroundings as she engages with both the ethical ramifications and representational limits of different forms of artistic creation.
