Elisa Shua Dusapin Is The Real Deal

Every so often, an obvious talent will suddenly appear from nowhere. The initial instinct, among critics, is to indicate this event as an event via a rush of comparisons. One such case was that of Elisa Shua Dusapin, 24 at the time of her debut novel, and 29 when her work reached English-speaking audiences. Dusapin was immediately inducted into a number of artistic lineages that all forecast some future importance. Dusapin writes a distinct type of novel—roughly 150 pages of sparse and haunted prose—that netted her comparisons to interdisciplinary titan Marguerite Duras, perennial Booker Prize competitors including Michael Ondaatje, Deborah Levy, Elena Ferrante, and a note from the publisher evoking Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux. International praise evokes all-timers the likes of Henry James, and Anton Chekov. Dusapin traverses the same banal dreamscapes made famous by filmmakers like David Lynch or Yorgos Lanthamos (in their less-hostile moments), where everything seems perceptibly wrong. Dusapin is also a truly international writer, born in France, and raised between Paris, Seoul, and Switzerland, she currently lives in Jordan’s capital city, Amman. Her books have now been translated into 35 languages, and she won the 2021 National Book Award for translated literature. The forecasting was correct, and she really does have a gift. 

Like the international cities she has called home, each of Dusapin’s novels is distinct, but united by her astonishing, borderline-generational talent for mood and atmosphere. The range of emotion is extensive, from the thrumming disquiet of her breakout debut, Winter in Sokcho, to the minor-key sadness of The Pachinko Parlor, to the simmering tenderness of Vladivostok Circus.

These three novels form a sort of unofficial trilogy, all appearing in excellent translations from the original French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, and were published by Rochester-based press, Open Letter. The Old Fire, Dusapin’s fourth novel, reaches a sort of synthesis of the three prevailing moods that have appeared in her novels thus far.