Translator: Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Published: Aug 2016
Pages: 154
Summary
It’s winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The cold slows everything down. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North’s watchtowers. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape.
My thoughts
This is a story that sounds totally up my street which is why I was so excited to read. But.. It fell flat for me.
Let’s start with what I did like, this mysterious French man shaking up our narrators life. Seeing these two characters from different cultures, come together and form an unusual relationship was intriguing. What let this down is that this is a very short book and with that, the story is very surface level. We don’t dive into the ‘why’ – why are our characters behaving this way, why do they feel this, why are they acting like this, what is driving them? Perhaps we’re not meant to know but it left me with so many questions that I felt unsatisfied.
To highlight an example, there was a moment that touches on the the daily fear and stress of living on a border town with a country you are still – technically – at war with. I really wanted this to book to dive into this and explore this feeling and way of living more. I wanted to see the contrast with our French character and the influence this has on them. But the moment had come and gone quickly, we never paused to explore it more. The book summary mentions the tension of guns pointing out from watchtowers so I expected more from this book with broaching those themes.
There were times our character behaves in ways that don’t make sense. They do things and make decisions which don’t match with the situation but we’re never let in on the why to understand our character. It is difficult to relate, or to feel connected to a character that is written with distance. There is a large trench between our character and the reader and there isn’t anyway to reach out.
Would I recommend?
Unfortunately not. Our main characters are written at a distance that I found it difficult to connect with them. Although there were many opportunities to use the story to dive into difficult, but very important, themes. Our story lacks depth and these opportunities were missed. It was still an enjoyable quick read, but a book I won’t pick up again.