"Reading takes you places you have never been so you can meet people you haven't met yet"
Snow Hunters is a beautifully written gem of a novel. It overtakes you like a dream - subtle, thoughtful, memorable. I immediately want to read more from author Paul Yoon.
Yohan has left Korea for Brazil aboard a cargo ship - it's 1954 and the war is over. The UN and the Americans enable his passage and provide him a job contact with Kiyoshi, the town tailor. Unable to speak the language, Yohan silently observes the village life and its people, learning the skills Kiyoshi teaches him. Slowly, there are friends - Peixe the church groundskeeper who has polio, and two gypsy children, but he is happy with his quiet life. Master tailor Kiyoshi was once a physician, once came to Brazil from Japan himself - that was another camp, another war; there is a bond between them.
The past is interwoven and we follow a teenage Yohan as the Russians arrive in Korea and war breaks out, families and friends cut off as the country is divided into North and South. Now conscripted, fate reunites him with a childhood friend Peng, and the two end up prisoners of war together in the barren camp. As the years go by, the present and the past unfold simply.
Yohan enters the future.
This is the journey of one man through the devastation of war, beginning a new life. You can never tell from looking what people have been through, and I am reminded that everyone has a deep history if we are still enough to listen. I found this very moving and will remember the time I spent there in Brazil, a time and a place I have never been, remember the night the power of the village went off, and Yohan, Kiyoshi and I went up to the rooftop...
"What stars, he said, and laughed, gazing up at that vast canvas above them, Yohan astonished by how it was possible that it was the same sky through all their years, in countries across the sea... A field of stars opened above him. The breath of sky. The path of lights on the ocean's surface, and the hill town to his left, all its windows like a blurred image as though another ocean were there, another body of water, draped across the high slope."
Highly recommended.
2013 / Hardcover / 208 pages
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