Sauf la frontière by Elisa Shua Dusapin
- Dimitris Schoen
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
A novel of borders, silence, and human connection
With Sauf la frontière, Elisa Shua Dusapin returns with her fifth book, once again demonstrating her ability to transform questions of identity, belonging, and displacement into intimate literary experiences. There is no English-language edition yet, but its subject and distinctive perspective make it a particularly compelling work for international readers.
The novel begins on the final day of a literary festival in Beirut. Dusapin travels towards southern Lebanon, unaware of what is unfolding on the other side of the border in Israel. It is the early morning of October 7, 2023.
Months later, after returning to Europe, an inexplicable premonition leads her back to the Middle East. She settles in Amman, Jordan, a city and culture initially unfamiliar to her. From there, the novel develops through encounters rather than conventional explanations. She learns Arabic, works alongside Jordanian women as a plumber, meets Syrian refugees, and shares brief but revealing moments with Palestinians and Israelis.
It is in these encounters that Dusapin's writing finds much of its power.
Rather than offering a definitive political explanation of one of the world's most complicated conflicts, Sauf la frontière approaches the Middle East through individual lives, gestures, silences, and fragments of conversation. The result is a novel that resists easy conclusions.
Beyond the border
The title itself points towards one of the book's central concerns: what exists beyond the borders we construct—geographical, political, linguistic, cultural, and psychological?
Dusapin is particularly interested in the distance between people and how that distance can sometimes be crossed. Language becomes more than a means of communication. Her protagonist's decision to learn Arabic is also an attempt to move beyond the position of an outsider and listen more carefully to the people around her.
Yet Sauf la frontière does not suggest that empathy can magically resolve political conflict. Instead, it explores the smaller spaces in which human understanding becomes possible: a conversation, a shared task, an unexplained gesture, or a moment of silence.
This is perhaps where Dusapin's approach is most striking. She does not write about the people she encounters as though they were simply subjects to be observed. She writes alongside them. Their presence gradually changes the narrator's understanding of the region—and, by extension, the reader’s.
A refusal of simple answers
Writing fiction about October 7, 2023 and the subsequent violence in the Middle East inevitably carries enormous political and emotional weight. Dusapin chooses not to simplify that weight.
No comfortable Manichean division exists between innocence and guilt, victim and perpetrator, outsider and insider. Instead, the novel remains deliberately attentive to ambiguity. Its characters exist within histories and identities that cannot easily be reduced to a single narrative.
This refusal to simplify is one of the book's greatest literary strengths.
The novel's luminous quality comes precisely from this tension. Violence is present, but Dusapin frequently approaches it indirectly, allowing what is absent, unsaid, or barely articulated to become as significant as what is explicitly described.
For readers interested in contemporary literature, Sauf la frontière is therefore more than a novel about a particular moment in Middle Eastern history. It is also an examination of what it means to witness, to belong, and to attempt to understand a place that one can never completely claim as one's own.
About Elisa Shua Dusapin
Born in 1992 in Sarlat-la-Canéda to a French father and South Korean mother, Elisa Shua Dusapin grew up between Paris, Seoul, and Porrentruy. She studied at the Swiss Literary Institute in Biel.
Her multicultural upbringing has become an important element of her literary identity. Questions of language, displacement, cultural memory, and belonging have appeared throughout her work, making Sauf la frontière a natural—if particularly urgent—continuation of her literary concerns.
Her debut novel, Winter in Sokcho (Zoé, 2016), received several prizes, including the Robert Walser Prize, the Alpha Prize, the Régine-Desforges Prize, and the SGDL Revelation Prize. Its English translation won the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature. The novel has also been adapted for the stage and for cinema.
Dusapin subsequently published The Pachinko Parlor (Les Billes du Pachinko, 2018), Vladivostok Circus (2020), and The Old Fire (Le Vieux Feu, 2023), further establishing her reputation as one of Switzerland's most distinctive contemporary writers. She has also published children's literature and regularly collaborates on theatrical projects. Her novels have been translated into more than 35 languages.
Questions for readers
Sauf la frontière is the kind of novel that invites discussion as much as interpretation. Readers might consider:
How does Dusapin's position as a visitor to the Middle East influence what she sees—and what she cannot see?
How do encounters with Palestinians, Israelis, refugees, and local communities complicate conventional ideas about borders and identity?
What does the novel suggest about the relationship between language and belonging?
Why are silence and gesture so important to the way Dusapin communicates experiences that resist straightforward explanation?
Can literature create a space for empathy without pretending to resolve political or historical divisions?
Does the narrator's position as an outsider make her observations more insightful, or does it inevitably limit her understanding?
A novel that asks us to listen
Sauf la frontière is ultimately a quiet book about a profoundly noisy subject. Dusapin does not attempt to compete with the political rhetoric surrounding the Middle East. Instead, she turns her attention towards the human scale of events.
That choice makes the novel particularly powerful.
For readers at Les Épicuriens Books, this is a book worth approaching not simply as a literary account of October 7 and its aftermath, but as an invitation to question how we look at borders, how we listen to people whose experiences differ from our own, and whether empathy can exist without erasing difference.
Dusapin offers no easy answers. Perhaps that is precisely the point.
References
Dusapin, E. S. (2016). Winter in Sokcho. Zoé. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_in_Sokcho
(2021). Elisa Shua Dusapin - National Book Foundation. National Book Foundation. https://www.nationalbook.org/people/elisa-shua-dusapin/
(January 7, 2024). Winter in Sokcho (film). Le Figaro. https://www.lefigaro.fr/culture/notre-critique-d-hiver-a-sokcho-peche-miraculeuse-20250107
(November 13, 2023). Elisa Shua Dusapin décroche le prix Wepler - Fondation La Poste. RFJ. https://www.rfj.ch/rfj/Actualite/Region/20231113-Elisa-Shua-Dusapin-decroche-le-prix-Wepler-Fondation-La-Poste.html
(May 20, 2023). Schweizer Kinder- und Jugendbuchpreis für Dusapin und Becquelin. Nau.ch. https://www.nau.ch/news/schweiz/schweizer-kinder-und-jugendbuchpreis-fur-dusapin-und-becquelin-66499280
Adamo, G. (January 28, 2024). Elisa Shua Dusapin: 'Swiss linguistic diversity resonates with me'. SWI swissinfo.ch. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/author-elisa-shua-dusapin-swiss-linguistic-diversity-resonates-with-me/49100656
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