This is such an odd, but interesting little book, which also, oddly, appears only to be available by Kindle in the U.S. right now, with a print book scheduled for 2021. I've seen it compared to Convenience Store Woman, which is an apt comparison, but Winter in Sokchu stands on its own.
It's narrated by a young woman living in Sokcho, a city in the far north of South Korea, so far north that North Korea is a very real presence, a frightening one. A popular tourist spot in summer, Sokcho is fairly dismal in winter, cold and dreary in spite of K-pop blaring from radios and neon lights shining from cafes and stalls. This young woman works in a decrepit guest house that isn't terribly busy in winter. Her boyfriend is going to Seoul to become a model. Her mother is the very definition of dysfunctional, berating her daughter for both eating too much and not enough, and suggesting she go to Seoul herself for plastic surgery.
Then a French graphic novelist arrives. He has a series of books involving a hero traveling to different parts of the world, and he's chosen Sokcho as his next location. As she tries to serve him food and launder his clothes, she becomes interested in his work and slowly becomes conscious of the disparate parts of her life and how they fit together to make her who she is. She acts as tour guide, taking him to various local spots to give him a picture of what Sokcho--and she--really is.
The book is short and spare, with recurring themes--the narrator's mother is a fishmonger and specialist in the art of dissecting blowfish to deliver safe fugu from an otherwise toxic fish. The narrator tries to cook many times, but no one seems to like her work. Another guest at the guest house is a woman who's undergone extensive plastic surgery, from which the narrator watches her slowly recover, eventually unpeeling her bandages.
It's not that a lot happens in this book. It's largely character- and place-driven, but what interesting characters, and what an interesting place. When the author tries to describe Normandy to her in terms of how it was affected by WWII, she isn't having it:
"What I mean is you may have had your wars, I'm sure there are scars on your beaches, 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 that 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."
It's a book that starts slow, then grips the reader as you go on. Glad to have read it.
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