Snow Hunters: A Novel (15 page)

Colum McCann once said that he’s always interested in writing about “the other.” William Trevor said something similar when he was asked why he often writes from the point of view of a woman.

Brazil, not long after the Korean War, was my “other.” A time and a place that’s a galaxy away from my own life. I think I tend to write about things I know nothing about out of sheer curiosity. In that way, weirdly, I’m more interested in the process of writing than in the end product. It’s far more rewarding.

For
Snow Hunters,
the start of that process began with reading about Brazil—educating myself on its general history, its major events—though I confess it was less a desire to be historically accurate than a way to immerse myself in an environment, a culture, to learn how to create a certain kind of atmosphere. Also, visual aids are always essential to me. I studied a lot of photographs of Brazil port towns and villages.

In a 2009 interview with
The New York Times
,
you indicated that you have long been interested in the literary form of the short novel. To what extent is the narrative of
Snow Hunters
representative of that form?

A few years ago I started reading a lot of short novels, one after another. The idea of experiencing a story of a certain length appealed to me. It became a passport of sorts for me to discover books from all over the world, books that not many people I knew had ever read or talked about. I’m thinking of J. L. Carr’s
A Month in the Country,
Cesare Pavese’s
The Moon and the Bonfires,
Glenway Wescott’s
The Pilgrim Hawk,
Victor Pelevin’s
Omon Ra,
just to name a few. It was one of the most rewarding reading periods of my life, not only because they were all amazing books but because I didn’t know many people who were reading those books. They felt like a secret. My own private stash of treasure.

How much these gems ended up influencing
Snow Hunters
I can’t say. And whether this novel is representative of the form is even harder for me to talk about. The length of
Snow Hunters,
or its identity, was never predetermined. I simply wanted to write the biggest story I could in the most concise way possible.

But I do think there’s a part of me that wrote
Snow Hunters
as a response to the many books I was reading at that time. In my childlike imagination I always have a selfish fantasy that a book I adore is a letter written to me. And so I write one back. And eventually all of them find one another somewhere in some dead letter office and exist together, happily, privately, forever.

As an immigrant to Brazil whose understanding of Portuguese is extremely limited, Yohan can’t communicate fluently with many of those he encounters in his new home. Can you describe your experience in advancing the plot of your novel without the benefit of much dialogue?

In my dreams all my characters are mute, so to know right from the start that Yohan’s communication skills were limited was about as close to a dream come true as possible. (That’s one of the many reasons the opening of Carson McCullers’s
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
is a favorite of mine.) I’m the worst at dialogue. It’s a great weakness of mine—getting people to talk. Which probably has more to do with my real-life communication skills, or lack thereof, than anything.

I’m being lighthearted about all this, but having little dialogue, especially in part 1, was not so much a challenge to me as a gift. It was freeing. I focused on images, places, gestures, objects, and so on. Those things had to do a bit more heavy lifting in order to make the story as dynamic and forward-moving as possible. And as the days went on, all those components felt like a kind of communication, between one character and another, between me and the book.

When Yohan is troubled by nightmares soon after his arrival, Kiyoshi tends to him and comforts him. Late in life, when Kiyoshi weeps over a young child’s winter coat, why does Yohan choose not to come to his aid?

There are several moments in this book when Yohan is unable to act. One interpretation is that on a very basic level he is, as a war veteran and a survivor of a POW camp, suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. A symptom of his PTSD is that he has created this wall between him and everything, and everyone.

As I worked on this book, revising it over the years, I began to cut away details about what exactly Yohan went through during the war and his time as a POW. What he witnessed. Some of it ended up in the book, enough, I think, to create a portrait, but I deliberately wanted to leave a lot of white space for those years—because I wanted the readers to imagine it for themselves and because I think it represents what Yohan has been going through since then: his mind is fractured. A good portion of his life has been spent either under occupation from a foreign country—whether that be Japan or Russia—or in the incredible, horrific violence and chaos of wartime.

Over the years he’s built a great emotional distance, a fissure he’s unable to step over. And I think a part of the book is about his slow path toward recovery, his building a bridge to the other side, so to speak.

So there’s all that. But I also think that at the particular moment when he hides behind a curtain and watches this man weeping who has been his guardian in Brazil, he can’t help but think of his own father. How Yohan used to watch him as a child. The enormity of how far Yohan is from his own childhood, how far he is from his childhood home, both physically and emotionally—that gap is so huge he’s completely stilled by it, frozen. It’s too big for him to process. So he turns and does nothing.

Bia and Santi are literally the first people Yohan encounters in Brazil, and he never parts with their gift of a blue umbrella. What compels Yohan to maintain his relationship with them?

I think when he was a boy Yohan was very influenced by the nomadic, restless spirit of the theater troupe, including Peng. And in some ways Bia and Santi’s appearance in the story, which is at first almost ghostly, reminds him of all the men and women and children who would visit his town and his home, playing soccer with him and performing magic tricks.

He has always been drawn to the itinerant life. Possibly the romance or the freedom of it, because Yohan’s childhood world is so small. He lives in the middle of nowhere, with a solitary father. He has no idea the reason the Japanese owner of the farm never visits is probably that the man is fighting in the Second World War. Even when the Soviets come he has no real sense of the political machine that Korea has been caught up in, or the ramifications of a military occupation.

Yohan does end up living a kind of itinerant life, of course, but in ways he never expected. He gets caught up in, for lack of a better word, history, and it leaves him feeling uprooted, unmoored, a bit stripped of himself. I think that’s another reason he is drawn to Bia and Santi, who are homeless and not really a part of this Brazilian port town. There’s a kinship there, all three of them being outsiders.

Why do Yohan’s memories of his friend Peng persist so powerfully in his memory?

For all the reasons mentioned above. Peng is also his one link to the past. So when that is gone, what does he have? I think as Yohan attempts to reassemble his life in the present day, he’s also trying to reassemble his past, and Peng becomes the bridge to the latter.

More importantly, I think Peng lives so powerfully in Yohan’s memory because of guilt. Guilt that he did nothing to help his friend. Guilt for surviving. Yohan knows it could have just as easily been himself who lost his eyes during the bombing. It could have, in the end, just as easily been himself floating down that river. Peng in some ways is the alternate narrative that could have played out for Yohan. He recognizes this. And I think it terrifies him. And that fear stays through the years. What makes someone give up? That unanswerable question sits in Yohan’s head as he struggles to start a new life.

At times in
Snow Hunters
,
as in the scene when the power goes out in the town, your narrative style takes on a distinctly poetic quality. Which writers of prose and poetry have most influenced you as a fiction writer?

Thank you. That means a lot to me. Influence is tricky—I think because we’re influenced by so many things, all the time. I’m like a sponge. Art of all kinds hung bright in my mind during the writing of
Snow Hunters—
paintings, photography, etc. (The sculptures of Giacometti, for example; or Wong Kar Wai’s
Happy Together
, a film set in Argentina.)

I do have heroes, of course, writers whose work has altered my life in significant ways, but there are too many to list here. Certainly Michael Ondaatje is one of them, both his prose and his poetry, everything. Nadeem Aslam is another hero of mine. I also remember reading David Grossman’s
To the End of the Land
while I was writing this book, and I remember how deeply grateful I felt to have experienced that, and to have his book exist in this world. I love Christian Wiman’s poetry. Frank O’Hara. Jack Gilbert.

I think, whether it be poetry or prose, what resonates with me and what I find interesting are the possibilities existing in a single sentence, a single line. It’s an awesome thing we do: we gather a bunch of words and make things out of them. So to think of how words play off each other is fun to me. It’s fun to wrestle with the rhythm of a sentence, to figure out the emotion of a sentence, to group certain words together and wonder what they might evoke in a reader. Those are the things I geek out about.

Of the many characters in the novel, Peixe is especially vivid and playful. How did you envision his character participating in the plot of the novel?

Peixe came out of a desire to create someone that would contrast with Yohan. There’s such a huge weight on Yohan’s shoulders as he starts his life in the hill town. It forms him in the way he moves, acts, thinks. He’s someone pushed along by a wave of internal pressure. I wanted to see how his story would evolve if someone different were introduced to him, someone with a bit more physicality—this groundskeeper who talks quite a lot and who is always outside, gardening and walking around with his cane.

It was also important to have a bit of levity. To have someone joke around a bit. Even though I wanted the reader to feel that huge weight on Yohan’s shoulders, I didn’t want the story to be sunk by it. I wanted moments of happiness and laughter, and I think Peixe, more than anyone else in this story, serves that purpose. He’s the one who will bring you up when you’re feeling down. He’s got that joie de vivre Yohan needs.

On a personal level, I think I needed him, too. I wasn’t exactly writing a comedy, and there were days when it was a great relief to be in Peixe’s company. To have someone who would make me smile. Who would take a silly little spyglass out of his pocket and make it magical.

I do want the reader to come away from
Snow Hunters
feeling that it’s a hopeful story. In all sincerity, I actually wanted to write a book with a happy ending. I wanted Yohan to find that light at the end of the tunnel. His peace. I think that, no matter his flaws, he deserves it.

The closing scene of
Snow Hunters
implies that Bia and Yohan will become involved romantically. Why did you decide to leave the resolution of their encounter up to the reader’s imagination?

We see Yohan in a very different light in this last scene of
Snow Hunters
. When he speaks to Bia, he is asking something of her. And those few words are his first willful act in a very long time. Perhaps his first ever.

If he has learned anything over the years it is that people leave. He has lost almost everyone he has tried to form a connection to, everyone he has loved. And yet knowing all this, he reaches out to Bia. Yohan, who has been unable to act, to step forward for so long, reaches out to her. I think it is the most courageous thing he has ever done.

That whole last scene is like a beginning. I wanted that sense of opening, starting, a breathing in and then out. When Bia stood up in the canoe, it felt to me like the first step toward a completely new life. It felt like another story. One I didn’t have access to, nor wanted to have access to. And that’s why I ended it there. It was time for me to close the curtain. To give them their privacy and let them be together without our looking in. No more words, no more pen, just the two of them.

PAUL YOON
was born in New York City. His short story collection,
Once the Shore
, was selected as a
New York Times
Notable Book and as a Best Debut of the Year by National Public Radio. It also won the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction and a 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation.

MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

SimonandSchuster.com

authors.simonandschuster.com/Paul-Yoon

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

Once the Shore