When a French cartoonist comes to stay at the rundown guesthouse the narrator works at, the two find themselves attracted to each other. But the chill and damp that saturate the book are central to its meaning. It’s a beach town that is bustling in the summer it also sits just more than 35 miles away from the border with North Korea, and “electrified barbed wire fencing” lines the shore.
“There wasn’t much to do in the winter” in Sokcho, South Korea, the unnamed narrator points out at the beginning of this compact, vivid novel. Winter in Sokcho, by Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins) The believable illusion of a well-written setting is crucial to the workings of storytelling, as Eudora Welty argues in her essay “Place in Fiction.” (Her Collected Stories is included in the list below.) “Fiction is all bound up in the local,” she writes, because “ feelings are bound up in place.” The books in this list meld the particular-the quality of the air, say, in Zambia’s Lusaka or the Sahara or a Finnish island-with the abstract and timeless in short, they capture what it’s like to be alive. That is the power of place in literature, and the closest that prose comes to a magic trick: The best writers can transport you to an utterly different time and location, and convince you that you can see it. I’ve never been to New Mexico, but I’m half-convinced I have by the clarity of these mental images. In the novel’s opening pages, a man winds his way through an endless landscape of conical red hills, so alike that “he seemed to be wandering in some geometrical nightmare.” Later, the bishop rides through the country and notices that the world is like a giant mirror: “Every mesa was duplicated by a cloud mesa, like a reflection, which lay motionless above it or moved slowly up from behind it.” But what remain indelible are two oddly mathematical vistas.
I have a sense that it involves a young priest rising through the ranks of the Catholic Church as New Mexico is flooded by settlers, and I also know that-spoiler alert!-he dies at the end.
Much of the plot of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop is lost to me, though I consider it one of my favorite books.
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