Book review: A French novel of bleak interior and exterior landscapes

Sokcho is an in-between place. It’s between the mainland and the sea, between beach and forest, and near the border between divided nations. In Elisa Shua Dusapin’s debut novel, Winter in Sokcho, a young woman in this South Korean tourist destination also finds herself neither here nor there, seeking release without necessarily acting on the impulse.

This French novel was the winner of the Prix Robert Walser, and is now translated into English by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. It’s yet another reminder that when it comes to fiction, short narratives can penetrate states of mind more deeply than longer ones.

Sokcho, in the novel, is described as a place that’s “always waiting, for tourists, boats, men, spring…They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it’s all fake, we’re on a knife-edge, it could all give way any moment. We’re living in limbo. In a winter that never ends.”

The unnamed narrator has just started work in a shabby guest house after returning from studying literature in Seoul. This is a traditional, restored house on stilts, with heated floors and thin dividing walls. “People washed up there by chance, when they’d had too much to drink or missed the last bus home.”

She is closed off and keeps her thoughts to herself, especially in her relationships with her mother, a local fishmonger, and fiancée, an aspiring model. As for her background, that’s in-between too: “My French origins were still a source of gossip even though it was twenty-three years since my father had seduced my mother and then vanished without a trace.”

A stranger from Normandy checks into this virtually deserted resort in the middle of a cold, bleak winter. This is Yan Kerrand, who, as will be discovered, is an acclaimed French comic book artist in search of landscapes for his next series.

The two strike up a shifting, uneasy relationship, although for the narrator, it is the artist’s work that begins to draw her like a magnet: “his drawing was wound through my thoughts; I couldn’t get it out of my head”. They travel to the 38th parallel, the world’s most heavily militarised border, as well as to a nearby nature reserve and a stationery store for paper and ink.

The artist’s tactile relationship with his material – sniffing, and sometimes chewing – as well as the layered and almost slapdash way he composes his monochrome ink-wash frames, exert an irresistible pull. She sneaks glances while he works and even breaks into his room to go over his drafts. Sometimes, on freezing nights, she can hear the sounds of his pen scratching through the paper-thin wall of her room: “A gnawing sound, irritating. Working its way under my skin.”

The nature of various forms of artistry, and the way these create identity, is an underlying theme. Among the guests at the boarding house, for example, is a young woman recovering from extensive plastic surgery, with her face covered in bandages. Then again, the narrator takes pride in her cooking, which is sometimes described in an eerie fashion. When chopping carrots, she sees their reflection in the blade of the knife, and “their grooved surface blended weirdly with the flesh of my fingers.”

Her mother, too, uses the translucent flesh of the poisonous blowfish “to create real works of art…[she] served it whenever she wanted to dazzle her guests.” Apt, because the narrator’s fraught relationship with her hidebound and traditional-minded mother is one she tries to get over by mindless over-eating.

Dusapin’s prose effectively captures an out-of-place mentality by crisp yet impressionistic descriptions of objects and interior attitudes without going into the reasons for them. It is this that largely creates the sense of intrigue, even suspense, that pervades the book.

Somewhat inevitably, Dusapin’s work has been compared to that of Marguerite Duras. Certainly, there are resonances when it comes to boundary-crossing, mismatched relationships as well as the iceberg-like quality of the prose which conceals depths. The young woman of Winter in Sokcho could well have smiled wryly if she had heard these lines from The Lover: “The story of my life doesn’t exist…There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.”

It is in the artist’s drawings that the narrator of Dusapin’s novel finally begins to find a more coherent sense of self. These revelations are handled with deftness; it would have been easy enough for the writer to turn these passages into conventional artist-subject material, but here, it is portrayed in strokes that are enigmatic and shadowy. In Winter in Sokcho, as in life, there are no easy redemptions.