Read 1 of 2022. Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin. Translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins.

Title: Winter in Sokcho
Author: Elisa Shua Dusapin
Translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Publisher: Daunt Books Originals
ISBN: 9781911547549
Genre: Literary Fiction, Novella, Translations
Pages: 154
Source: Publisher
Rating: 4/5

Dusapin’s debut novel is about a young biracial Korean woman living and working in a small guesthouse in Sokcho, South Korea, a beach town that is quite close to the North Korean border. It is almost possible to take a day trip over the border.

The narrator, the woman is unnamed. She has returned to her hometown from her university in Seoul to be close to her mother. She doesn’t know her father as he left before she was born. She works as a live-in receptionist and a cook at the aforementioned guest house and that is when she encounters a middle-aged French graphic novelist, Yan Kerrand, who has come to Sokcho to seek inspiration and work on his new project. He is perhaps old enough to be her father, maybe that’s why the strong feelings she feels towards him.

Nothing happens more or less. Time passes and then there are moments. There is no definitive action and maybe that’s when Sokcho plays such a huge role in the book – the broodiness of the town, the season of winter shining through and looming large on the lives of everyone – right from food consumed to the smells to the octopus to also the constant terror from South Korea, and mainly the isolation.

The protagonist’s relationship with food is the one she has with her life – always thinking nothing is good enough – so she eats and purges it all out. Her physical body then becomes a thing of critique by her mother, her aunt, and even Kerrand to a large extent.

Winter in Sokcho is an unusual book in the sense that it says so much in so little. The brevity of the prose had me from the start. Dusapin conserves her words, using them only if really needed to. Some sentences are staggering – like the one about not knowing the outside world, of just staying in Sokcho and nothing happening there. The translation from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins is sharp and precise.

Winter in Sokcho delivers such a potent story, that you cannot help but think about it later. There is this constant ache that lingers – of lost communication, of expressions that are not understood, and emotions that are better hidden than told. Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho captures desire, motherhood, life along a border town, loneliness, and above all the need to make sense of one’s surroundings most beautifully, also making us aware of the darkness beneath the surface.

Books/Authors mentioned in Winter in Sokcho:

Guy de Maupassant

Read 267 of 2021. These Precious Days: Essays by Ann Patchett

Title: These Precious Days: Essays Author: Ann Patchett
Publisher: Harper
ISBN: 978-0063092785
Genre: Nonfiction, Essays
Pages: 320
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

I remember reading my first Ann Patchett novel in the year 2011, and that changed so much about the way I used to live. Bel Canto did and still does so much to me not only as a reader, but also as a person. I am of the firm belief that if certain books have the capacity to do that, then they must be kept close for the entire lifespan.

Having said that, I started devouring everything that Patchett had written before Bel Canto and in the coming years after. This is mainly about her fiction. Now about her non-fiction. The essays mainly. She writes the only way she knows and wants to perhaps, with utmost honesty. This is what I feel every time I read her – a sense of deep honesty. “These Precious Days” her latest collection of essays made me feel just the same and more.

When Patchett speaks of her three fathers, you are moved to tears, because you are reminded of your own father and men who are father figures in your life. When she speaks of literature, you are tempted to pick up her favourite reads. Patchett has a deep sense of friendship, so of course she celebrates some of her friends in this collection. She speaks of her mother with fondness and wit. The title story of the collection is about her acquaintance with Tom Hanks, and the long-lasting beautiful friendship she shared with his assistant Sooki who was battling pancreatic cancer.

Patchett’s writing is without pretension and that’s what makes it not only relatable but also empathetic. Her writing style is her own – it is enchanting, real, glorious, and unafraid to go into deep corners of the mind and heart and present life the way it is – unpredictable, constantly evolving, and mainly lived through memories.

Read 266 of 2021. The Swank Hotel by Lucy Corin

Title: The Swank Hotel
Author: Lucy Corin
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 978-1644450666
Genre: Literary Fiction 
Pages: 400 
Source: Publisher 
Rating: 4/5 

The themes explored in “The Swank Hotel” are large and sometimes hit home very closely. There is familial loss, grief, a tangled web of relationships, and a lot of times just plain confusion.

It took me a while to even get to the core of the novel – which is discontentment, the madness surrounding all of us, the madness we are all a part of it, and yet constantly living day after day.

Em, a corporate employee is haunted by her sister’s disappearance. Her sister, Ad, who has battled mental illness for much of her adult life, and this disappearance isn’t a new one. This plagues her everyday living to a large extent and there is this unspoken guilt that she cannot get rid of. At the same time, there is her manager Frank who has a long-time affair with a married man, Jack, who Em obsesses about. We also meet Em’s parents who are in the state of constantly building their home, which also becomes about their age.

The plot of The Swank Hotel is perhaps not a plot in that sense and yet there is so much going on in it. The structure of the book moves from stream of consciousness at times to vignettes to people just being left half-way in the plot only to come back with no tying up of the story, and yet everything comes together in its own way at its own pace. The writing is sharp, meandering, touches the core, and sometimes just the surface, and all of it is imperfectly perfect, just like life and the medley of characters we encounter in this work that is experimentative and unique.