Winter in Sokcho

Winter in Sokcho: Kerrand's Review


Winter in Sokcho, the debut novel from author Elisa Shua Dusapin, is the first-person narrative of a young French-Korean woman (whose name is never revealed), educated in Seoul but having returned to her unremarkable hometown of Sokcho. The book mainly revolves around her emerging-but-awkward relationship with a French artist. His name is Kerrand. And that's me. 


It makes sense that she wrote about our encounter. If I were not French, I would be tempted to say our time together was the epitome of je ne sais quoi, but of course being French I could not descend to such cliches. It was strange and powerful. A few minutes searching synonyms on the internet shows me that the English word I'm looking for is “ineffable”. The ineffable, fleeting collision of our lives. 


Elisa (I know I should use her last name, but it's too odd for me, as I never learned it until the book) writes beautifully. I'm an illustrator, not an author, but I find her style to be crisp, rhythmic, and yes, even pretty. In length, it can only be considered a novella. It clocks in at under one hundred and sixty pages, but with dozens of chapter breaks (shrugging off the convention of being named or numbered), it reads even shorter.


The narrative made me sad at times. Why didn't Elisa name the protagonist? At first I thought it may have been a problem as to the continuity of the story whether she should have a French or a Korean name. However, I realized later, it was central to her theme. A woman with no name might be seen, but she cannot be known. 


The issues with body image, female relationships, and food all were concealed behind her curtain of beauty and wit. I never saw them. It's strange – every time I come to know a woman who does not mention these things, I still assume it means they do not experience them. I should have learned their universality by now. Why could she not? For the same reasons she felt she could not speak to me in French? 


I was shocked that the narrator never explicitly mentions our age gap, simply making a factual statement as to the year of my birth on page one. It was my primary concern throughout and surely was the driver of my mercurial behavior toward her. Her youth, expressed physically and emotionally, was ever before me. I could not see past the decades of inkstain on my hands, the ache in my back from twenty years (which was the distance between us) of huddling over sketchbooks, and though my body is lean, it is soft from a steady diet of packaged pastries, as Elisa uncovered to all. I thought her merely polite in not teasing me for being near her mothers age. Why had I assumed so much? 


Of course, no, my name is not Kerrand. I appreciate the attempt to cloak my identity, though anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the graphic novel genre would immediately recognize me from the description of my work. And it is the descriptions of my work which I found most breathtaking. The care and attention with which Elisa depicts my physical form while creating my art was an out-of-body experience. The words melting into the motion of my pen, the dripping of the ink, the curve of my hand. And the sounds? How had I never considered the scratching of my pen as the requiem for my hero's conquests? These passages compressed and reformed into images such that I'm not sure I remember the words at all. 


I did not want to like this book. As you can imagine I was uncomfortable with the very idea of it. But I cannot lie. What I experienced in Sokcho, I see now, was the inevitable result of a longing. That is the soul of Winter in Sokcho. The longing for knowledge of oneself, and the longing to have oneself be known.