Saturday morning I was feeling utterly drained, overwhelmed by all the things I need to do, the multiple books I'm partway through, everything. So, of course, I started reading another one... Winter in Sokcho turned out to be the perfect read for this kind of mood. It's short (yay short books!) but also utterly absorbing, deftly sketching out the emotional subtexts generating the tensions between characters. The novel follows the interactions between a young French Korean woman who works at a guest house, and an older Frenchman, a cartoonist, who has come to draw Sokcho for his next book. It's not a thriller, exactly, but it feels like one sometimes: there is a clear sense of danger and ominousness, though you can't quite put your finger on why. Is it because of the ambiguities of their relationship? Does it come from her sense of ennui and aimlessness? Or is it because of her tortured relationship to her body?
The narrator's troubled relationship to food, and the way it mirrored aspects of the plot, reminded me of Han Kang's Vegetarian (which I didn't particularly love), and this novel, too, has a kind of detached and impersonal quality. But where that can be offputting in some novels, in this one it drew me in. I think part of what makes it work so well is that it gives you just enough of a sense of various currents of subtexts — the complexities of ethnic identity, food, tourism, historical trauma, family dynamics — which are elegantly figured by repeated, obsessive observations of the Frenchman's cartoons, the swirls of ink that evoke characters, desires, stories, but also drown them in clouds of ink. It's quite dazzling, formally.
For me, at least, it struck the perfect balance in terms of obliqueness; there's an open-ended, cryptic quality to it, but you nonetheless feel all the satisfactions (at least I did) of a plot-driven detective story.
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