One could question if the narrator sought the absent French father figure in Kerrand or Kerrand sought the woman he wishes to sketch perfectly, ‘a woman of all time’ as he says, in the narrator. The ambiguity of their constant back and forth, along with the occasional familiarity of their silences, is deeply fascinating. The narrator and Kerrand’s relationship essentially propels the story. The author never tells us the name of our narrator, but a few facts that one gathers about her are that her father was a Frenchman who had seduced her mother and vanished about 23 years ago, that she was a university student at Seoul before she came back to her hometown Sokcho, and that she has a rather complex relationship with her mother, her body, and will eventually have, with Kerrand. Here, the young Korean woman of 24, whose voice and perspective drives the narrative, is helping the guest house owner, Park, run the place. The book begins with ‘HE ARRIVED,’ a French comic illustrator named Yan Kerrand in a small and almost rundown guesthouse in the South Korean seaside town of Sokcho. I wanted to create something concrete, something visual and sensual, rather than mental and intellectual,' tells me Elisa, whose answers to my questions were also `translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. I drew storyboards to help me visualise things. I constructed the novel as a series of sequences. 'I literally made a film in my head to write this book. It is, however, viscerally charged and complex, bringing the author’s literary brilliance to fore. The language is so simple and comforting, paradoxically nuanced yet made of sentences short and succinct, that one might mistake the author’s narrative to be too simplistic. There is nothing complicated about the way Elisa writes or the way Aneesa Abbas Higgins has masterfully translated the book. I find myself lucky to have read this book during the dead of Delhi’s winter and letting it embrace me with its beguiling charm.

The book was originally written in French and has now been translated and published in English by Daunt Books this year. Elisa Shua Dusapin’s debut book, Winter In Sokcho, is one such book, that took me a mere three hours to read, but its after effects will stay with me for a lifetime. They constantly remind you of their existence with every breath you take, leaving you paralysed by their effect and a sense of longing to return to them so intense, that the boundaries between fiction and reality begin to collapse. There are very few books which tend to linger not just in your mind long after you’ve read them, but also in the air around you.

You’ve come to the right place,’ I laughed. ‘What brings you to Sokcho in the dead of winter?’

Winter in sokcho review