Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin

"You never use color?"

"I don't see the point."

I frowned, dubious. Sokcho was so colorful. He pointed to a scene of a snowy mountaintop with the sun high overhead. A few lines showing the outlines of the rocks, that was all. The rest of the page was blank.

"What matters is the light. It shapes what you see."

Looking again, I realized I didn't see the ink. All I saw was the white space between lines, the light absorbed by the paper, the snow bursting off the page, real enough to touch. Like a Chinese ideogram. I scanned other panels. The frames seemed to distort and blur, as though the main character was struggling to break free of their confines. Time expanded.

The narrator of Elisa Shua Dusapin's Winter in Sokcho lives in a resort town near the border between North and South Korea. During the summer, it bustles with people, but during the winter, it begins to show its seedier, emptier side. The narrator works at a hotel where her only patrons are Seoul residents who come to recover from their plastic surgeries in hiding--something her boyfriend, too, plans to do, and encourages her to do as well. This grim but routine life is interrupted when a French graphic novelist arrives at the hotel, considering setting his next work in Sokcho, but mostly looking for peace and quiet. In the night, the narrator sees him working at his graphic novel, a wordless epic in black-and-white, which he effaces with ink over and over again. Sometimes he even eats the pages. She finds herself drawn to him, both repelled by and attracted to the attention of his artist's eye, and agrees to show him around the empty tourist sites of Sokcho.

Winter in Sokcho is, in part, a novel about seeing: the narrator balks at others' (notably Korean?) obsession with plastic surgery, but again and again when her mother trains a judgmental eye on her and calls her thin, she eats until she's sick. She takes the graphic novelist, Yan Kerrand, to places that only tourists care about--like a viewpoint in the DMZ--but through his eyes she begins to see Sokcho in a new way, as an outsider might. At first she has trouble explaining her attraction to him, but eventually she realizes that she yearns for him to draw her, wanting to be seen by him, or anyone. The ambivalence with which she regards him expresses how difficult--but necessary--it is to be seen and known by another. His attraction to her is less explained; she seems as magnetic to him as he is to her, but what is it other than her willingness to show him around?

Kerrand is something of a cipher in the book, a mute and unappealing figure whose creative expression is marked by being wordless, colorless, and infrequent. (One of the strangest things about Winter in Sokcho, actually, is that a traditional novel about a graphic novelist seems by nature half-articulate, like something narrated from behind a curtain.) Honestly, neither of the characters seemed very appealing to me, both of whose main characteristics seem to be inarticulateness and driftlessness. The novella fails to come to a resolution when one is badly needed, I think, to justify its slightness and aloofness. It's a novella about new ways of seeing, but what's seen, in the end?