Normandy

Normandy is introduced not as a setting the narrator visits but as a place mediated by conversation, comparison, and a drawing. It is Yan Kerrand’s home region in France, which he associates with dense grey light and colder, emptier beaches marked by war. The narrator imagines it as beautiful and melancholy; later, when Kerrand draws a house, cows, and a distant port, he names the landscape for her. Normandy thus takes shape at a distance, through differing descriptions that make it at once a real place and an image exchanged between the two characters.

A Place Named from Afar

At a bus stop where the narrator and Kerrand are alone, she learns that he is from Normandy. Asked what she pictures, she describes it as pretty and somewhat melancholy. Her impression is already literary: Kerrand responds that Normandy has changed since Maupassant’s day, while the narrator answers by comparing that change to Sokcho. The exchange places Normandy and Sokcho in parallel, not as identical landscapes but as places each perceived through an inherited image and through the changes time brings.

The novel keeps the region at a remove. The narrator does not report travelling there, and the details arrive through Kerrand’s descriptions or his art. This distance matters to the way Normandy functions in their conversation: it is familiar enough to evoke writers and painters, yet sufficiently elsewhere to offer a contrast with the narrator’s own surroundings. The region is not simply an escape from Sokcho. It is a place whose appearance is discussed, revised, and rendered by other people.

Kerrand’s Account of the Region

When the narrator asks what France is like, Kerrand cannot reduce the country to a single impression. He describes it as large and different from Korea, praises its food, and singles out the light in Normandy as grey and dense. He also offers to show the narrator his studio if she ever visits. The offer connects the landscape to his artistic life, while leaving the visit hypothetical: Normandy remains something he can describe and perhaps show, rather than a destination the narrator reaches in the narrated scenes.

The narrator challenges the relative scarcity of Normandy in Kerrand’s work, suggesting that there must be more happening there than in Sokcho. Kerrand rejects the premise, and the discussion turns to the precedent of artists who have used Normandy, including Maupassant and Monet. That exchange gives the region a double status. It carries cultural associations strong enough to be invoked through famous names, yet Kerrand resists treating it as inherently more eventful or more suitable for art than Sokcho. His answer makes the comparison less a contest between a provincial present and a celebrated European landscape than a question about what an artist chooses to see and depict.

Beaches, Light, and War

Kerrand’s most specific verbal portrait of Normandy concerns its beaches. He distinguishes them from the crowded beaches in the south of France, whose visitors, he observes, do not seem especially happy to be there. He prefers Normandy’s beaches because they are colder and emptier, and because they bear their own scars from war. The description combines physical character with historical trace: the beaches are defined not just by climate or the number of people on them, but by marks that remain in the landscape.

This account resonates with the narrator’s view of a beach near the Korean border. In the rain, the pair see barbed wire, bunkers at regular intervals, and sub-machine guns protruding from openings; she points the weapons out to Kerrand. Against that visibly guarded coast, she remarks that French beaches must be less threatening. Kerrand’s reply complicates the contrast. The war in Normandy is said to have ended long ago, but its scars remain part of the beaches he prefers. The two coastlines are not equated: one scene displays active military fortification, while Kerrand’s description concerns marks left by an earlier war. What connects them is the presence of conflict in the landscape, whether seen in weapons or remembered through scars.

The Drawing Given to the Narrator

After the narrator ends a phone call with Jun-oh, Kerrand opens his sketchpad and begins a drawing. Its parts emerge in sequence: a roof, a tree, a low wall, seagulls, and a brick building unlike the houses in Sokcho. He adds lush grass, contrasting it with grass burned by summer sun and winter frosts where they are. Then he draws thick, cow-like legs and whole cows, followed by a distant port, flat land, and windswept valleys. Pencil shading completes the image before he tears out the sheet and gives it to the narrator, identifying it as Normandy.

The drawing makes concrete what conversation has kept at a distance. Its details do not reproduce the earlier description of grey, dense light or explicitly show the war scars of the beaches; instead, it assembles a rural and coastal landscape from buildings, animals, grass, and a port. The contrast with Sokcho is built into the paper itself: brick houses and lush grass differ from the local houses and weather-scorched grass the narrator knows. By naming the finished image Normandy and handing it to her, Kerrand turns a place associated with his origins and artistic practice into something the narrator can keep. The gift does not take her there, but it gives their conversation a material form: a landscape shaped by his hand and received by her.