Snow Hunters

It's a small story of Yohan living out his days after the Korean War in Brazil, apprenticing to a quiet Japanese tailor. It's a tightly constrained life where little happens so it's up to Yoon to make the moments relevant. He tells a economical story with an arguably predictable arc, but it takes up no more space than it needs to.

It's not that I didn't like this book. I did. It's a short, quiet narrative that I was quite interested to follow. But I am puzzled by it, too. It is extremely quiet. Very little happens, at least not in the present, which is what forms the bulk of the story. And the language is surprisingly static, perhaps on purpose. (Start counting the instances of the verb “to be” and you'll quickly lose track, there are so many.) There are also some odd shifts of point of view that I thought were unnecessary, and there's not a whole lot of dialogue, either. In general, it's a story that feels “told” as opposed to being “shown,” and as a result, I just can't say that I love it.

See my full review here: Review of Snow Hunters