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    Snow Hunters: A Novel
    Snow Hunters: A Novel
    Snow Hunters: A Novel
    Audiobook3 hours

    Snow Hunters: A Novel

    Written by Paul Yoon

    Narrated by Paul Yoon

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award, Snow Hunters is “a subtle, elegant, poignant read” (Oprah.com), featuring a Korean War refugee who emigrates to Brazil to become a tailor’s apprentice and confronts the wreckage of his past.

    “Exquisitely enigmatic…a small but radiant star in the current literary firmament” (The Dallas Morning News), Snow Hunters traces the extraordinary journey of Yohan, a twenty-five-year-old North Korean POW refugee who defects from his country at the end of the Korean War, leaving his friends and family behind to seek a new life in a port town on the coast of Brazil.

    Though he is a stranger in a strange land, throughout the years in this town, four people slip in and out of Yohan’s life: Kiyoshi, the Japanese tailor for whom he works, and who has his own secrets and a past he does not speak of; Peixe, the groundskeeper at the town church; and two vagrant children named Santi and Bia, a boy and a girl, who spend their days in the alleyways and the streets of the town. Yohan longs to connect with these people, but to do so he must sift through the wreckage of his traumatic past so he might let go and move on.

    In Snow Hunters, “quotidian-surreal craft-master” (New York magazine) Paul Yoon proves love can dissolve loneliness; that hope can wipe away despair; and that a man who lost a country can find a new home. “The brief, simple sentences that form this elegant tone poem of a novel…have the effect of making you slow down to read them—which is a fitting way to experience the story of a man unmoored by memory and time” (Entertainment Weekly). This is a heartrending story of second chances, told with unerring elegance and absolute tenderness.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateAug 6, 2013
    ISBN9781442366022
    Author

    Paul Yoon

    Paul Yoon is the author of four previous works of fiction: Once the Shore, which was a New York Times Notable Book; Snow Hunters, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award; The Mountain, which was an NPR Best Book of the Year; and Run Me to Earth, which was one of Time’s Must-Read Books of 2020 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in the Hudson Valley, New York. .

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    Reviews for Snow Hunters

    4/5

    94 ratings19 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is a sad, moving story of a young man recovering from his wartime experiences in a strange country where he doesn't speak the language. He has a hard time forming attachments and can't express his emotions even after he learns the language. We're given a minimum of information so we often don't know what the characters think or feel. I'm not even sure exactly how the book ended. I guess the reader is to finish the closing scene. It's tempting to give the book a happy ending, but given their past and their level of distrust, can they form a relationship?
    • 4/5
      Poignant story about a man who relocates from Korea to Brazil after being captured and spending over a year in a prison camp. There are only a handful of characters. Yohan is taken in by a tailor and becomes his apprentice. He meets a pair of orphaned children. He makes a friend of the groundskeeper at the local church.

      This is a sparse poetic story of a man trying to find his way back from the trauma he experienced during the Korean War to form a life in a new country. He has trouble connecting with people, we assume due to suffering from PTSD (though this is not stated). It is beautifully and atmospherically written. We learn Yohan’s backstory via (minimal) flashbacks.

      Yoon’s writing appeals to me. It is elegant and expressive. In only a few words, he can draw scenes that become vivid in the mind’s eye: “But there were also times when he was unable to move, unable to look at her, afraid he had been imagining this and that she wouldn’t be there. It seemed possible. And when he considered this an emptiness overwhelmed him, as if he were no longer here, that there was just his shell of a body bent over a table. And even as he continued to hear her behind him he felt a sadness, though for what he could not say.”

      It is a quiet, meditative story. This book is not for anyone looking for plot or action. It is a delicately drawn character study. I found it a well-crafted piece of writing that packs a great deal of emotional content into relatively few pages.

      “In this way the days passed. Those days became years. Those years a life.”
    • 3/5
      audiobook, narrated by authorReleased Korean POW declines to go back to his home country after the war and instead becomes an apprentice to a Japanese tailor on the other side of the world. A quiet, character-driven story about a man learning to connect with people again.
    • 5/5
      Sparse, yet so rich.
    • 5/5
      Sparse language makes the reader create their own mental visual of the story. Yoon is a master at this in his story of a Korean soldier who was sent to Brazil by the UN to become an apprentice to a Japanese tailor
    • 4/5
      This is a lovely, short read about a young man rebuilding his life after a war, in this story a young Korean man who is relocated to Brazil after spending much of the Korean War in a prison camp.
    • 5/5
      I usually am not drawn to books like this...it is meditative, slow, thoughtful. But the beauty and simplicity of the writing and the feel of the lost, loneliness and longing of the main character Yohan, grabbed me and I actually savored this book up to the last page!
    • 4/5
      Lyrical and spare, this novel describes Yohan's life in Brazil after being a prisoner of war during the Korean War. He becomes an apprentice to a tailor after he immigrants, but in spite of their closeness to each other they really don't know each other's stories. Yohan is both disconnected from his community and an integral part of it, a dichotomy that is conveyed by the flat affect of the characters.
    • 5/5
      This debut novel is absolutely exquisite! Paul Yoon is a phenomenal writer. His prose is poetic and profound, yet simple. This is a tale of tragic loss and the transformative power of kindness. In a short novel with minimal dialogue, the protagonist is a veritable phoenix, surmounting unimaginable loss, yet retaining kindness, compassion, and love. A meditative, touching tale. A must read!!!
    • 3/5
      Yohan is arriving by sea to Brazil, choosing not to repatriate to North Korea after living a couple years in a South Korean POW camp during the Korean War. Yohan is a gentle soul, surprising for anyone who has had to live through anything traumatic. The trauma is implied here. There are only hints to Yohan's life before Brazil, as a child in North Korea or fighting in the war, choosing to focus on how to live after the horribleness that the universe sometimes presents. After all, a life should not be defined by the worst experiences. The blurbs on the book mention that the story was edited down from 500 pages to a sparse 200 pages. I might have liked to read more about Yohan's past, but the writer wanted to leave more to the imagination. Yoon's writing is best when it focuses on tiny poetical details. I can only imagine that those who have survived the worst traumas have a knack for appreciating the smaller beauties in life, what others might call insignificant. Paul Yoon is a writer to watch!
    • 5/5
      Fantastic examination of solitary lives and their intersections with the past lives of the individuals examined.
    • 5/5
      Snow Hunters is one of the most lyrical and beautiful books that I have ever had the pleasure to read. It is a immigration story set after the Korean war, and our man, Yohan is about as nice a guy as they come. I cannot even start to tell you how wonderful the prose is in the this book, it's like liquid poetry flying off the pages to say, stop, listen, learn. Read this book. You will understand after you do.
    • 4/5
      The Snow Hunters tells the story of Yohan, a Korean war prisoner who has made his way to Brazil aboard a cargo ship. Uncertain of what his future holds, he disembarks with little besides a card with an unfamiliar name and address on it and a blue umbrella. The latter was given to him by one of the sailors, who pointed out the young girl who directed him to give it to Yohan. The card leads him to the shop of an elderly Japanese tailor who takes him on as an apprentice.Told in understated, lyrical prose, Yohan's story takes us through his adjustment to a new life. Kyoshi, the tailor, never speaks of his own past or what brought him to Brazil, but it's hard not to like his character as we see his love and concern for Yohan. From the beginning, he is more than an employer to Yohan, and over the years, the two become almost like father and son. Among the friends Yohan makes are two street children, Bia and Santi, and Piexe, the caretaker of the local church. The novel only briefly touches upon the horrors of the war and the prison camp, most movingly in Yohan's haunted memories of the friend he could not save.Yoon uses sensory details and images well, both to allow the reader to enter this world and to convey mood. If there is one notable flaw in the book, for me, it is the improbable conclusion, which ties things up too neatly. In the last chapters, I was also irritated by the portrayal of Bia, now a grown woman; this was mainly because she (or Yoon) seems to be trying to hard to make her a 'mysterious creature' of sorts.Final reckoning: The book is better than average, but just by a few hairs. I would recommend it to anyone interested in lyrical prose or the immigrant experience. And it's very short, more novella than novel.
    • 5/5
      Snow Hunters follows Yohan, a tailor who lives in Brazil, as he adjusts to his new life, new occupation, and as he struggles with his memories of war and friendship in his native Korea. It’s a novel about place and time. Reading it, I could imagine standing in the sun on the coast of Brazil, what it would be like to feel the small triumph of learning a street’s name.Mr. Yoon’s pose is spare but illuminating; it often reminded me of Hemingway’s writing, but with more light behind the shuttered windows. Here’s one of my favorite passages:And he understood that he would never be able to hold all the years that had gone in their entirety. That those years would begin to loosen, break apart, slip away. That there would come a time when there was just a corner, a window, a smell, a gesture, a voice to gather and assemble. (151)Beautiful. Writing that bears re-reading.
    • 4/5
      Snow Hunters opens with North Korean twenty-five year old Yohan arriving in Brazil via a cargo ship shortly after the end of the Korean War with a business card of a Japanese tailor in hand. Thus begins the introspective telling of Yohan’s journey. It is a testimony to the sparse elegant prose that so effectively conveys the quietness and solitary soul of Yohan with a gentleness of a whisper. I was not quite sure what to expect from this story but was intrigued by the blurb of learning of a migration and war we do not often hear about, and was rewarded with a fascinating yet melancholy read. As Yohan’s figures out the world around him based on his past and present – it is with an open eyed innocence with an eye for simplicity yet fullness of spirit as he needs to figure out which of his memories he will be able to keep, what new memories will replace the ones, and once he is gone who will have a memory of him.But, time and time again it was the beauty of the language that just so much with a perfect phrasing of a sentence. I recommend this book to readers who enjoy lyrically told stories with a freshness of storytelling style.
    • 3/5
      3 starsFirst impression: There is beauty in the words. You feel the North Korean war refugee's aloofness in his new country, Brazil. The distance he feels and his reticence is palpable. Narration by the author adds to the lines' impact. A blanket of quiet overlays the story.People can talk without words. What is not said can speak louder than what is said. And what a person does doesn’t always reflect what they are really saying. This book captures that. It draws a world of silence and solitude that does speak and does convey a message. You watch what happens. You feel the atmosphere. There is a distance to all that happens and to the characters themselves. The manner in which this is achieved is artistically done. Beautiful rather than boring. You are drawn in. Slowly, slowly this North Korean war refugee assimilates and comes to feel at home in his new country, in an unnamed village in Brazil. S-l-o-w-l-y the past recedes, the memories blur and he melts into a new life. You read this book to feel his dislocation, the alienation of one who leaves one country for another. Leaving both horrible memories and good memories, sort of like stapling up picture upon picture until the pictures at the bottom aren’t gone but are superseded by others that are newer, stronger, more vibrant. You cannot just rip out those pictures at the bottom, can you? Is the ending realistic? No, maybe not, but I am OK with that. You do not read this book to follow the plot line from A to Z. Neither does the story follow a chronological order. Memories come and go, and that is how you learn of the pastAn atmospheric novel, to be read to understand how it is to be completely alone in a new world. You never start from scratch, since we all have our own pasts.
    • 5/5
      *I won this book via Goodreads*5 StarsAfter the Korean War, Yohan finds himself making a new life on the coast of Brazil. There he finds himself the friend and apprentice of a tailor, Kiyoshi. Through their work he learns a new language and the way of life in the community. Acquaintances and relationships come and go with time but the bond he forms with Kiyoshi, the church groundskeeper, and two vagabond children is what helps him conquer the demons of his past so he can embrace the future.There is no way for me to do this novel any kind of justice. If I was to describe it in just a couple words those words would be; brilliantly beautiful. I don’t know what to write except to try and describe what I felt while reading. For me the impression of relationships was the strongest. Yohan has a lot of people come and go in his life and they were mostly for brief periods of time or during brutally difficult times. Some that were longer in duration weren’t very communicative or physical like we would expect them to be. For Yohan, though, they all had an importance that he carried and reflected on and would comfort him when he needed it most. The prose is almost magical. There is a lot of sadness but there is always something inspiring to balance it out. The pacing is perfect and once I read the first page I didn’t want to put it down. The only thing left to say is that I absolutely adored this book and that everyone should read it.
    • 4/5
      Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon is a beautiful little book. It seemed almost fairytale like or seeing a life of a person through a light fog. The story alternates between different times in the life of a Korean expatriate. When he was a boy brought up with kindness but without emotion or conversation by his father. He ran away from North Korea after the war. He had been imprisoned for two years with a casual friend of his childhood. After Yohan gets off the boat to Brazil, he heads for an address on a card. He doesn't know Portuguese, anything about Brazil or the climate. He finds the address of a Japanese tailor. The whole first half of the book has so sparse conversation that is seemed uniquely peaceful and beautiful. It is almost like the author is painting a picture instead of writing a story. Yohan sews and helps the tailor in other ways and they form a relationship that doesn't require many words. Yohan’s world includes a boy and a girl that come in and out of his life when they want to. This little book has so much beauty in it. You can feel the heat and when it becomes cold, smell the cooking of the town women and admire the art in their lives and in nature. Yohan is very appreciative of art, the little windows in the building where he made deliveries and the article that he found in the alleys. You realize that you have to own things to enjoy their beauty. The silence was beautifulLater in the book I wanted more details, more depth but this book will always linger in my memory. I recommend this book as an adventure in reading. It is not what I expected but I was deeply satisfied.I received this book as a win from FirstReads but that did not influence my thoughts in this review.
    • 4/5
      Yohan is a North Korean war refugee. After a stint in a prison of war camp, he is able to board a cargo ship and emigrate to a Brazilian coastal town. Here, he becomes a tailor’s apprentice, working under the steady hand of a quiet Japanese gentleman, with a mysterious past. In this strange foreign world, Yohan builds a new life for himself, forming bonds with other outsiders and misfits like himself.This is a slim, spare novel, that unfolds at a languid but steady pace. The writing is good but I was hoping for a bit more depth. Regardless, I would read more of Yoon’s work.