...this short, exquisite novel is not easily defined by a simple artist-muse relationship ... the brevity and pacing of its vignettes are also reminiscent of comics, Kerrand's books having 'no dialogue, very few words.' Conversely, Dusapin's beguiling work resembles a vibrant graphic novel, sans pictures ... This irresistible and spare novel sketches with exquisite depth a season of searching for both a French Korean woman and a French visitor.
...engrossing ... Winter in Sokcho is an enigmatic, beguiling book that documents stasis and the helplessness felt by someone trying to overcome it ... Dusapin is equally adept at depicting exterior landscapes ... The conflict with North Korea makes for interesting background detail ... This finely crafted debut explores topics of identity and heredity in compelling fashion. In its aimless, outsider protagonist there are echoes of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman and Jen Beagin’s Pretend I’m Dead ... engaging.
[A] compact first novel ... Dusapin’s terse sentences are at times staggeringly beautiful, their immediacy sharply and precisely rendered from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins ... Oiled with a brooding tension that never dissipates or resolves, Winter in Sokcho is a noirish cold sweat of a book.
Winter in Sokcho is a gentle, quiet story of a slowly developing relationship ... filled with such well-observed, wry detail ... The short scenes, the economic language, the quick cuts in scene, abridged dialogue have the rhythm of a bande dessinée (a French comic), but with prose substituting for the drawings ... Those who care to can observe the care Aneesa Abbas Higgins has taken in her translation, capturing almost word for word Dusapin’s laconic prose and varied rhythms of the original.
While Winter in Sokcho is centered on the quietly tortured romance between Kerrand and the narrator (whose boyfriend is away in pursuit of a modeling career), Dusapin’s carefully considered approach to emotion is best shown in the relationship between the narrator and her mother ... It is easier to conceptualize a city like Sokcho on the grand scale of metropolises and colonial histories, but through Dusapin’s artful language, the city is rendered as an intensely personal place, constructed by small, sensual acts.
A slender and carefully crafted work of fiction, Winter in Sokcho could easily be read in an afternoon but warrants more dedicated attention ... Because of the spareness of Dusapin’s writing, much is left for the reader to contemplate in what promises to be a rich reflection.
Dusapin calls into question the preconceived notions we have about foreignness and identity, and Aneesa Abbas Higgins’s translation from the French lends a layer of cold familiarity to a deeply personal story. I love this book. I love the new experiences it has given me—the mystery, the longing, the loving, and the ghostly solitude of a beach town in winter.
Dusapin’s use of the narrative first person, so common in the coming-of-age genre, does extra work by isolating the reader within the head of the narrator, giving the author space to explore the nuances of her story and the complicated and flawed cast of characters she encounters within an environmentally and symbolically rich landscape. The restrained voice of the narrator, sensitively rendered from French to English by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, manages to convey a surprising amount of information through the subtlest of inflections ... while, superficially, very little happens in Winter in Sokcho, the psychology of this fascinating young woman holds our attention. The plot is no more than a brief window into the narrator’s life, the hopeless monotony of which is broken by the arrival of Kerrand and will be taken up again when he leaves. Dusapin reserves the climactic moment, such as it is, for the final pages. The sinister twist, surge of violence, or outburst of emotion I anticipated never came ... Dusapin relies on empty spaces, the blank spots in her narrator’s history and all the things which exist outside the periphery of her (and hence our) understanding. The resulting story and characters, given shape by what is missing and lost, are hauntingly beautiful. They linger within us.
Dusapin’s first-person narrative is formed of crystalline sentences that favour lucid imagery to describe themes of loneliness, familial obligation, identity (the protagonist’s mother is a Korean fishmonger, but she doesn’t know her European father), societal pressures and sexuality. And while all this seems to lie just beneath the same layer of ice that keeps the town frozen over the winter, Dusapin has a knack for thawing the narrative with moments of intimate tension between the protagonist and Kerrand, or with more intensely corporal descriptions ... Throughout the novel there is a melancholic sense that, like footprints in the snow, the relationship between the protagonist and Kerrand is on the brink of melting away. And it’s only at the very end, at the brittle edges of this love story, that the characters break apart from each other. It’s also in this act that they finally find themselves coming into form.
Though slippery in its thematic effect, the language in this masterful short novel is to the point, written in sharp first-person and full of indirect speech. Many of the short sentences don’t bother with verbs at all ... The protagonist is a keen observer of people, cutting in the way those who hover at the sidelines often are in judging others ... The visceral texture of this scene is deeply uncomfortable to read. The woman has escaped Seoul to avoid wandering eyes, but still, she is watched.
Winter in Sokcho isn't event-full. Not much happens, not much is going on. A deep freeze freezes everything and everyone even more in place, and there's a listless character to both narrator and the situation. Yet underneath there is a buried simmering, occasionally rearing its head—notably in the narrator's sudden fits of ravenous hunger and her stuffing her face ... The dominant sense in Winter in Sokcho is one of suggestion, a sense of the narrator emerging from the descriptions of her days that are largely humdrum and routine, even as little is made explicit by her ... Dusapin has a nice touch with her understated approach. Winter in Sokcho seems to proceed with the simple sameness of sleepy small-town winter, but much more is bubbling underneath here ... a haunting, suggestive little story.
... haunting ... The prose is crisp and poetic; the translation, by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, a sharp mirroring of the French text ... deserves to stand alone.
Elisa Shuan Dusapin’s spare novel Winter in Sokcho made waves with its subtle language and atmospheric setting ... It helps, too, that the book is written to be read in a single sitting. It’s a short novel, full of visually evocative and poetic considerations of love, language, and connection. Winter in Sokcho begins and ends like dew drops in winter, collecting each night and evaporating the next morning ... Winter in Sochko delivers an unassuming but potent story that lingers. What is most riveting is the constant push and pull of language in the novel ... Dusapin is able to hold the attention of her readers because of the novel’s suggestiveness. With its serene energy, terse conversations, and unexpected viscerality, Winter in Sokcho conjures up a season I already wanted to revisit after laying the book down.
Dusapin’s luminous debut follows a young French Korean woman as she wrestles with desire, daughterhood, and identity ... Dusapin’s precise sentences, expertly translated by Higgins, elicit cinematic images and strong emotions. This poignant, fully realized debut shouldn’t be missed.
...atmospheric ... Dusapin's novel avoids clichés in the woman's developing relationship with the lonely foreigner, who turns out to be an internationally renowned graphic novelist looking for inspiration for a new book. The woman observes the man and never looks at him as a savior or stereotypical lover. Instead, Dusapin depicts a fiercely intelligent, independent woman who longs to be seen clearly for who she is and the choices she has made ... The descriptions of daily life in the titular town are beautiful, elliptical, and fascinating ... A triumph.
... reads like a muted fairy tale. We never quite get under the skin of the main characters, this girl in her guesthouse who is never named. It’s interesting that Yan Kerrand is a creator of other worlds – not quite from this one, not quite from another. But a creator and a recorder of stories nevertheless ... a dream novel, a brief glimpse into a young woman not quite coming of age, frozen in the ice of both her home city and her family situation ... A brief dream of a novel, which opens up our worlds.
