Snow Hunters: A Novel
Page 12
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.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Paul Yoon
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition August 2013
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Designed by Joy O’Meara
Jacket design by Christopher Lin
Jacket photograph by Adrian Pope/Getty Images
Author photograph by Peter Yoon
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yoon, Paul.
Snow hunters : a novel / Paul Yoon. — First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.
pp. cm.
1. Korean War, 1950–1953—Veterans—Fiction. 2. Refugees—Korea (North)—Fiction. 3. Brazil—Emigration and immigration—Korea (North) 4. Loneliness—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3625.O54S66 2013
813′.6—dc23 2012048365
ISBN 978-1-4767-1481-3
ISBN 978-1-4767-1483-7 (ebook)
Contents
Epigraph
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part II
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part III
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
About Paul Yoon