‘Oozing Winter and fish, Sokcho waited,’ the unnamed narrator of Elisa Shua Dusapin’s haunting debut, Winter in Sokcho,‘He needed me to help him see.’
‘Oozing Winter and fish, Sokcho waited,’ the unnamed narrator of Elisa Shua Dusapin’s haunting debut, Winter in Sokcho, tells us, ‘That was Sokcho. Always waiting. For tourists, boats, men, Spring.’ When a mysterious Frenchman shows up to stay during the winter, our narrator’s life is slowly thrown asunder by their slow-burn growing friendship as he asks her to show him the ‘authentic’ Sokcho. Like the town in winter, the whole novel reads like a breath held and waiting, with Aneesa Abbas Higgins translation (for which this won the 2021 National Book Awards for Translated Literature) lovingly rendering Dusapin’s prose in all it’s compulsive and eerie beauty. There is a deep undercurrent of ideas accruing inside this novel that exists like the dust on butterfly wings. It’s as if it subsists on atmosphere and tone alone, pulling you through its sparseness of narrative landscape and bleakness of winter off-season living like a frenetic fever dream. Yet still there is a denseness vibrating through themes of endless war, alienation and cultural identity that come alive in a dark dance of body-image issues, family dynamics, ghosts of colonialism and more. A moody yet gripping story of two strangers trying to truly see each other and themselves, Winter in Sokcho is an emotional noir of culture and identity adrift in the fogs of life. [image] (Sokcho Harbor, where much of the novel takes place)
This is a novel where not much happens but there is so much bursting beneath the surface. While it doesn’t add up to much, it is impressive in the way the individual scenes build a strong tension and stand strongly on their own imagery but also powerfully accruing with each added moment. Like Kerrand’s style of storytelling, it is ‘a story [that] evolved constantly, every drawing was as important as the next.’ This book rides a growing feeling like a tidal wave of overpowering dread. Dusapin can really execute atmosphere.
I'm quite a fan lately of moody little books set in off-season towns, such as That Time of Year or The Weak Spot, and this fits well with them. It may be due to living in a summer town myself and experiencing the stark difference of cold and quiet from the hectic summer days catering to tourists. As I write this we are coming up on the climax of our yearly Tulip festival and the town is overrun by visitors (during a pandemic, so add whatever emotional undercurrent to that as you will).
Loneliness and alienation permeate the novel like warm butter into every nook and cranny of a muffin. These are characters struggling with identity, and weighing out how much of self-perception is forged internally and how much is externally influenced. We have the narrator and her body dysmorphia struggles, the artist unsure where to lead his protagonist, a boyfriend caught up in modeling, a young woman recovering from plastic surgery, and a whole nation cut off from it’s upper counterpoint in an uneasy cease fire. The narrator has internal issues gaslit into her by those around her, constantly criticized by her mother over her physical appearance and lack of eating as well as her lack of a marriage even at a young age.
In Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, No Exit, there is a lack of mirror is Hell and characters can only see themselves reflected back through the impressions of other people. This is part of the torment, a Hell of self-examination where the self may be lost into the assessment of others, and the risk of adopting a bad faith persona. Dusapin delves into this territory as the narrator’s attraction to the French artist who comes to stay is centered in her desire to be seen by him. ‘He looked through me,” she observes upon their first encounter, ‘without seeing me.” While she spends much of the novel touristing him about Sokcho in his quest for an ‘authentic’ South Korea, she initially tries to see herself and her half-French heritage in him. She wants him to look at her in a way that is ‘showing me my unfamiliar self, that other part of me, over there, on the other side of the world. I wanted more of it. I wanted to live through his ink, to bathe in it.’ Their awkwardly Oedipal friendship—he is old enough to be the French father who skipped out on her—grows as she tries to understand the Frenchness in him, but is pushed away by his refusal to actually see the Koreanness in her.
’I didn’t want to be his eyes on my world. I wanted to be seen. I wanted him to see me with his own eyes. I wanted him to draw me.
Wanting to be seen as herself becomes her aim later in the novel contrary to her other drive to disappear. These conflicting struggles with a sense of self are reflective of a larger political conflict. The scar on her leg serves as an effective, complex metaphor of self-image struggles and the DMZ dividing North and South Korea. Additionally, her French and Korean identities won’t quite combine in her being, feeling both a part and alienated from both. She studied French arts in college but is cold towards Kerrand’s descriptions of Normandy. She lives in Korea but cannot seem to satisfactorily prepare traditional food.
Yan Kerrand has his own share of interpersonal struggles, a man who strikes the narrator as ‘as being very much alone.’ He is in Sokcho looking for inspiration for the final volume of his graphic novel series. The series is described to us by the narrator as such:‘’A different location for each book, a voyage in monochrome ink wash. No dialogue, very few words. A lone figure. With a striking resemblance to the author’ that Kerrand says is fairly inspired by Corto Maltese but changed to ‘ a globe-trotting archaeologist’ instead of a sailor. ‘He needs a story that never ends,’ he tells the narrator, ‘a story that’s all-encompassing. A fable. A complete perfect fable.’ All his art is a strive for perfection, but one he can never grasp and is always fearing once he releases his stories to the readers they will not fully grasp what he wanted to convey. He fears the mirror self. He cannot create women characters, it seems, because he feels he must understand them enough to draw in a singular line. Hiis flighty mention of having been married and the late-night drawings of ever-changing women the narrator witnesses hints at something buried deep within him, haunting him.
In his search of an authentic Korea, he misses the real Korea for the tourist version. He only goes to museums and seems to dislike being out amongst people on the streets to breathe in the city, he doesn’t eat the local cuisine and opts for Dunkin Donuts or westernized versions instead (he even dismisses all of Asian noodle recipes as inferior to Italians). He dislikes Sokcho, but the narrator seems to think he cannot ever understand it.
‘He'd never understand what Sokcho was like. You had to be born here, live through the winters. The smells, the octopus. The isolation.’
Much of this is indicative to a colonialist mindset that may hold only subconsciously. The desire to Westernize Korea in order to accept it, to consume it on his term. While the narrator has her own food-related struggles, Kerrand seems to display pica when he tears off and eats his art paper. This also seems to be him trying to consume what he can’t grasp, a reflection of France colonizing Asian countries.
He also does not seem to value the differences between France and Korea, and this troubles the narrator. While walking alone Korean beaches fenced in by barbed wire with North Korean gun turrets visible on the horizon, he reflects on the beaches of Normandy as still bearing ‘scars from the war’ and that ‘you’ll still find bones and blood in the sand.’ The narrator recoils at this, reminding him it was ‘a war that finished a long time ago’ and not a constant threat like they experience in South Korea. She rejects his assertion that they are the same.
’What I mean is you may have had your wars...but that’s all in the past. Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real. 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.’
This endless limbo is at the heart of the novel’s atmosphere. The balance between life and death hangs over everything, such as the mother’s liscenced job to extract the toxins from seafood to be eaten. The narrator, caught up in the slow churning whirlwind with Kerrand, begins slicing portions of her own life out, but with her clumsiness with a knife that is well established throughout the book, is she actually extracting toxins or self-mutilating? Everything crashes into an enigmatic but satisfactory conclusion that looks head on into the nature of art and being seen.
Now a word on the translation, which is great and now I want to read anything Aneesa Abbas Higgins translates. I really love Open Letter Books. I love a non-profit small press, particularly one that focuses their attention on translation. While publishers are doing the work and slowly moving towards inclusivity here in the US--YA publishers often leading the charge--which is wonderful. It is great that these new voices are being heard and we should also be looking outside our own borders and not only center American or Western perspectives. Translation can help give us that. A study has shown that only 3% of books published in the US are translated works (compare that to, say, Italy where over 50% are translations). Of that 3%, only about 35% are by women. So I enjoy publishers like this who are doing the work, finding really great titles and presenting them in really nice editions like this one (I swear I am in no way affiliated or receiving compensation for writing this, I just think this publisher is cool). So basically I like translators and am very interested in their art. Aneesa Abbas Higgins delivers a feast of tone and atmosphere here in her treatment of Dusapin’s original French. In conversation with the translator and Literary Field Kaleidoscope, she worked closely with Dusapin asking on the ideas underlying the images’ and ‘to clarify if I had understood them.’ Higgins states that ‘English needs to spell out things a bit more than French does’ and for a novel that thrives in the intangible, this is a key aspect to perfect for full effect.
Winter in Sokcho is a brooding novel that lumbers slowly, picking up in intensity. There is so much atmosphere one might feel like swimming through a fog, and it sustains the novel beautifully. So many quiet tribulations form a cacophonous choir muffled beneath of surface but their tremors are felt in every sentence, bubbling out of every scene. Dusapin has a marvelous control over her tone and craft, and this is an enviable debut.
‘What, I wondered, is the point in being a person if you don’t inspire other people’
Those with power tend to gain or retain their status by manipulati‘What, I wondered, is the point in being a person if you don’t inspire other people’
Those with power tend to gain or retain their status by manipulating others in order to exert a power over them. Finding their weak spot in order to manipulate is the theme of Lucie Elven’s aptly titled debut novel, ‘The Weak Spot’ in which August Malone, the pharmacist of a small European town, positions himself as a valued listener to all the townsfolk before running for mayor with all their secrets at his disposal. It is a reminder of the way we are all ‘profoundly singular and vulnerable’ and demonstrates the way practicing being a good listener gets others to open up. Our unnamed narrator unlocks this skill under Mr. Malone’s tutelage and reveals a menacing atmosphere around her boss and all his interactions. While much of the story is rather vague, Elven shows the way an unexpected adjective can bring a sentence to life and a well chosen verb can explode into vivid imagery and makes The Weak Spot a true treat that really grips you. The Weak Spot is a slow-creeping examination of manipulation, gaslighting and misogyny as a sinister path to power seen through the lives of those who are used for that purpose along the way.
This is a book where not much happens and what does is shrouded in ambiguity much like the rolling fogs through the town’s countryside, but Elven’s exquisite writing creates such a startling atmosphere while her sentences dazzle into surprising directions. ‘I loved the idea that the right phrase could ease harm,’ the narrator says, ‘the way an effigy of a beast might protect a town from illness.’ Much the same can be said of the way Elven’s prose makes you feel. The writing is crisp and snappy, the chapters economical and brief, moving productively forward with great efficiency not unlike the narrator’s work ethic in the pharmacy. Much of the novel involves her interactions with coworkers and customers and much of the novel deals with interpersonal relationships and power dynamics between people.
‘When I acted like Mr. Malone, it gave me a feeling of magical control.’
Having just arrived in town to work at the pharmacy, it is instantly clear that Mr. August Malone is held in high esteem by the townsfolk. Many come daily to the pharmacy just to chat and to have their thoughts heard and valued. Those who speak to him ‘felt as though he were at the foot of a huge statue,’ so when he puts in his bid for mayor it is no surprise he already has a dedicated following. By following Mr. Malone’s lead and by losing herself into the town, the narrator, too, is able to get people to open up to her. She soon discovers she ‘had no ego left,‘ becoming a pliable persona to coax customers into telling her more. [L]ike a contortionist threading her fillet of a body through her arms,’ she describes herself, ‘I automatically climbed into the customer’s perspective.’
I felt like what he said was a thin cloth he held over what he meant, letting me see its shadow or its shape protruding. If I pushed at the veil, the mystery under the surface would poke out.
Much like her ability to get people to talk, the narrator develops an ability to see the troubling truth behind the veil of small-town niceness and formalities. For Mr. Malone, however, getting people to open up is more about exposing their weaknesses, and he is more apt to manufacturing scenarios in order to do so:
Mr. Malone believed that we observe people best from an angle: when they are in a rage, when they are our parents, or when, panicking, they have lost control of themselves.
By doing so he finds he can exert control over others. A manufactured scandal leaves the narrator feeling at his mercy until she discovers later it is a lie. His hold over Annie Milk, an assistant he hired at the pharmacy right before his mayoral race due to her political science degree, is particularly horrifying. To keep her running his campaign and feeling obliged to him, he resorts to outright gaslighting. A day after events ‘he provided a different memory for her to remember,’ or ‘he always acted as though the conversations hadn’t happened afterward,’ refitting reality in order to make her feel out of control. The narrator faces a similar situation with her Uncle, (family issues, particularly unresolved mother tensions, are also a running thread in the novel) who took offense to a disagreement she had with him once and began spreading the rumor that she was a drunk in order to diminish her opinions.
Elven brushes upon the notions of misogyny as defined by Kate Manne as the policing of patriarchy in order to retain power for men and ensure women cannot take any of their own. This treatment extends to Mr. Funicular as well, who is punished when seen in a dress--transness often being viewed as a major threat to traditional masculinity--by having his access to town popularity taken away by shutting down production of his play.
Regarding traditional masculinities, Mr. Malone’s campaign is grounded in ideas to making the town great again and returning to traditional impressions of the town. For Mr. Malone ‘the town’s empty houses pertained to a larger loss of pride,’ one that he feels he is capable of restoring under his lead (though hard-pressed to actually explain to the press how it would be done). The novel works as a subversive commentary on recent election trends, particularly the ways in which surveillance of social media data has lead to manipulative meme politics (Cambridge Analytica, anyone?) to exploit potential voters.
Early in the novel we hear of a fable surrounding the towns history, one where ‘a sullen and extraordinary beast that had settled here, which was eating the girls alive.’ The beast drives people out of town before being driven out of town himself, which draws curious parallels to Malone’s disdain for people leaving town (and away from his grip) and his tendency to use and abuse women for his own purposes. ‘We had all lost parts of our own lives,’ the narrator says referencing herself, Annie and coworker Elsa, ‘so that August could go bashing away at his new one.’ As usual, women’s physical and emotional labor is used to uphold the man and he thinks nothing of it.
This is a quick and effective little book where the ambiguous aspect perfectly plays into the atmosphere of the novel. Much of the book is very destabilizing, even weather conditions are pointedly mismatched from the narrator's inner emotions and impressions of events are often later pushed aside by alternative views. The gaslighting aspects of Mr. Malone is reflected well through this narrative style and shows how Malone is able to manipulate in order to diminish and silence others. By the end we find the narrator giving into her rage, being brash, much less accommodating and with no interest in upholding Malone’s carefully crafted public image. Through this embrace of her true self after having pushed it down and away for so long, perhap she will embody the previously mentioned effigy of the healing beast the town desperately needs.
3.75/5
‘Everyone liked to be taken somewhere. Everyone liked to dream. I recognized all the symptoms....more
‘i've seen the fall, is this the price you have to pay?’
I’ve always found living in a summer town to be an apt metaphor for seasonal depression. Here ‘i've seen the fall, is this the price you have to pay?’
I’ve always found living in a summer town to be an apt metaphor for seasonal depression. Here on the lakeshore of Holland, Mi, we have quiet yet brutal winters of lake effect snow that suddenly burst into green and festivity with our spring Tulip Time festival when a revolving door of tourists flock into town and pack the streets until the end of the summer season. It is either sheer bleakness, or effervescent festivity that switches off and on like a lightswitch with the change of seasons. The well decorated French author and playwright Marie NDiaye, recipient of France’s highest literary honors--the Prix Femina and Prix Goncourt--illustrates life in a summer town as a cloying psychological horror in her 1994 novel That Time of Year. Translated by the wonderful Jordan Stump, NDiaye scratches at the idyllic surface of a French summer town to expose a Kafkaesque nightmare lurking beneath. This is a place where every congenial smile masks cruel intentions. A startling feast of atmosphere, That Time of Year examines a cloistered culture of strange traditions, oppressive surveillance and assimilation, and a hostility to outsiders all hidden behind the public persona of eminent hospitality.
The story is fairly simple: Herman and his Parisian family have decided to stay one day beyond the August 31st end of summer holiday in their summer tourism town but his wife and child have gone missing. Overnight, the paradisal town has turned from warm and sunny to nearly unrecognizable in a sudden onslaught of cold, grey and rainy weather--‘that abrupt drop in temperature put the finishing touch on his terror’--and the jovial residents' hospitable nature has gone from charming to ominously predatorial as they smile at him while ignoring his plight of missing persons. ‘They smiled when Herman looked back,’ she writes of a rain-soaked Herman shivering his way through the downtown beset by merchants faces watching from store windows, ‘but only with their lips, an almost urbane smile, excessively revealing their teeth.’ The police have no interest in helping Herman, and anyone to whom he tells of his plight smile and listen intently, but show little interest in assisting him. Only a local bureaucrat Alfred, who once suffered the same predicament as Herman, offers to help, but with such overinterest it is alarming. ‘become a villager,’ Alfred tells him, warning him of the disdain the villagers have for Parisians, ‘invisible, insignificant’. This is the only way to see his family again, he is told, and thus begins a slow and subtle turning of the screw as Herman’s will is squashed in the oppressive atmosphere and strange charms of city officials in this tucked-away French village.
‘Most of the people around here didn’t like outsiders experiencing autumn, which was in a sense none of those outsiders’ business, maybe they thought the intrusion into their mysterious post-summer life indiscreet?’
NDiaye builds an atmosphere in this novel that gives a fever-pitch terror to the strange and elusive events that transpire. It reads like a nightmare, just adjacent to reality in its surreal depictions of the town. There is an enormous City Hall built under a hill with an elaborate mechanism of its multitudinous employees, the hostile hospitality that reads with a shiver, and the strange traditions that just evade explanation. All the women, for example, either wear the same apple blossom print blouse that binds their breasts in or the city worker uniform complete with an arrangement of ribbons signifying their relationship status. No ribbons ‘meaning you can talk to her in a certain way, and she’ll answer the same way,’ Alfred tells Herman in an unsettling and overly indulgent way that impresses upon the reader this is a patriarchal society (later doubled down upon when a case of sexual assault alleged against a step-daughter is deemed as negative to her character more so than his). It is a town where everyone is always watching, always judging, and the only way to keep going is to bend to their ill will.
While written in 1994 (though not translated until 2020), which grants a timeless quality to the book where the lack of modern technology like easily accessible internet or cellphones is helpful in creating the sense that Herman has been shut away from the world, the ideas of surveillance that permeate the novel have become all the more relevant. There is no sense of private, personal space here and even locking one’s door is seen as indecent. Other villagers want to look into Herman’s room and to keep them out would be viewed as rude and trying to hide something. The whole invasive notion that surveillance--or even The Patriot Act here in the US--are only frightening if you have something to hide are depicted as the menacing, oppressive beasts they are. French philosopher Michel Foucault examines the social disciplinary society of the panopticon in his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Using Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon as it is used in prisons--a round room where everyone can view everyone else with a prison guard tower in the center. ‘the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment,’ Foucault writes, ‘but he must be sure that he may always be so.’ Knowing he is always observed, and often surprised to learn Alfred has known about his whereabouts before he even returns to their hotel, Herman’s will to be an individual and an outsider begins to crack. The constant observation ensures his docility and compliance with their culture.
In the modern world, we are always observed as well. And this doesn’t just apply to video surveillance, though face recognition software has become readily available and sold to police and military forces, but to the ways our online life puts us constantly in the public eye. We never know who is looking at our photos or data, or when, but we are fully aware that it is happening. Just notice how highly specific some targeted ads on a social media feed can be. In an era of Surveillance Capitalism where personal data has overtaken oil as the world’s leading commodity our online presence becomes a form of social engineering that responds to our actions in real-time and corralls us towards consumer behaviors desired by corporations (I completed a degree in this, its wild and terrifying stuff).
Assimilation becomes the ultimate goal in this town, a flattening of personalities and otherness. Written by a Black woman, this adds an unspoken insidious element to a town described as entirely white and blonde (Alred has bleached his hair to fit in, but his ‘dark’ eyebrows and arm hair betray him--read into that as much as you will). As time passes, Herman forgets about life in Paris and even shakes in fear when--to accommodate Gilbert who wants to show him off as his ‘Parisian friend’ to gain social currency with a wealthy friend--travelling to the nearby town L. because he is afraid he is betraying the village.
‘[Herman] came to think that vitality is in no way a necessity, nor is a certain sort of happiness made up of varied activities, heart-felt affections, and a comfortable, discreet wealth...for the moment he was drawn to the possibility of an indolent but not ignoble, serenely oblivious degeneration.’
The town breaks people down and keeps them stuck within it like a void. The families of those who stay seem to roam the town like ghosts, not answering to their names as they look forlorn at the gloomy landscape like souls awash in purgatory.
Despite their dislike for the high-manners and wealth of Parisians, upon whom their economy depends, the unnamed village has its own class system hinging on wealth. The merchants seem to cast a shadowy control over the town. ‘[T]he merchants of this place are a bad lot,’ Alfred warns, ‘dangerous, cunning, their tentacles go everywhere; they’re rich as kings but plead poverty.’ They hold the Mayor’s ear and he seems to be a puppet to the Chamber of Commerce. The inscrutable machinations of the city politics with their massive staff, hushed methods and disinterest in actually helping beyond faked smiles is what really takes this novel from seeming akin to the psychological horrors of Shirley Jackson right to Franz Kafka.
Now if you were to describe a town like the one in this novel: an oppressive summer town full of fake hospitality but really a nightmarish culture of traditions, surveillance and run by a shadowy, dangerous merchant mafia, I’d say “oh, I know that town, it’s where i live in Holland, Mi”. This book hit me HARD in that regard. It is a town where the downtown is mostly owned by the mother of Eric Prince (you know, the war profiteer who operated Blackwater) and Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy Devos, and the white, upper-class feel to downtown is very sternly maintained (oh, they also own a mega-church here). There is a joke about ‘West Michigan Niceness’ and LET ME TELL YOU it is real. This is a place where people tell you they ‘will pray for you’ as a way of letting you know they hate you and all you stand for, and fake smiles are basically the local motto. As an outsider to Holland, having moved here ten years ago from across the State, I stuck out and people made sure to let me know and I basically had to assimilate and Herman’s scary slide--he is described as literally melting--into it all seemed a parody of what I see here. Also there is a sense that villages assume big city folks look down on them as some country bumpkins, which is also fairly true of Holland. And also just fairly true, I once worked for a coffee company in a nearby town where the owner from Chicago outright said it all the time. Anyways, the fake smiles hiding devious intent in the book really reminded me of West Michigan vacation towns, and honestly this book could be set here (fun fact, all the creepy ‘present day’ parts of Station Eleven is set on the southwest Michigan lakeshore where I am stuck living).
NDiaye delivers an atmospheric treat with That Time of Year that will make anyone wary of overstaying their welcome on vacation. It was really charming to read this during the first week of September, when the novel is set, while also experiencing cold, rainy days while living in a town that reminded me so much of the book. It should be cautioned, however, that those who need resolution or to have major mysteries explained will likely not enjoy this book. At all. While it more or less thematically answers the big philosophical points of the book, the narrative is left pretty wide open. That sort of thing doesn’t bother me and honestly the abrupt end kind of really worked for me here. This is a book that would fit very well in the catalog of Dorothy Publishing Project but Two Line Press has done a really lovely job with it and I adore this compact hardbound edition. Also, this book has such great visual energy to the writing, you practically see the eerie film this would be perfect to make. Drawing on critiques of an oppressive surveillance culture, That Time of Year is a haunting delight that, while a bit sparse and swift, leaves a lasting impression.
3.5/5
‘Because what did they know of the fall around here, what did they know of these people’s ways once all the outsiders were supposed to have left?’...more
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