Book review: Snow Hunters, by Paul Yoon
Paul Yoon's Snow Hunters is a novel in which little happens - not, in many ways, unlike life.
Paul Yoon's Snow Hunters is a novel in which little happens - not, in many ways, unlike life.
Yoon explores the experiences of Yohan, a North Korean who defects in the 1950s, after the Korean war. Moving back and forth between Yohan's adjustment to life in a Brazilian coastal town and his memories of childhood as well as of a period spent as a prisoner in an American hospital camp, it is a lovely novel, subtly rendered, operating "as though someone, somewhere, were dreaming this and he had crossed into it without permission. Everything both familiar and foreign".
Yohan does not speak Portuguese when he arrives in Brazil. The closest he comes to a confidant is Kiyoshi, the Japanese tailor who sponsors him and with whom he moves in as an apprentice and eventually a friend. Even so, it is a quiet sort of friendship.
Yoon is describing a form of compression, the way a life gets boiled down to its essential parts. He mirrors this with the compression of his storytelling, whereby in sticking to the surfaces, he manages to illuminate the depths.
Because he can't communicate, Yohan remembers: he sorts the past as if his memories were bits and pieces of the fabric that he stitches in the tailor's shop. He recalls his friend Peng, blinded by a bomb blast in the last days of the war, and the way he had to let him go. He thinks about his father, a farmer who makes pots and vases in his spare time; even after the older man's death, Yohan imagines that something of his essence lingers in these creations, "that somewhere underneath the glaze and the paint there remained his father's hands".