Our score
Outstanding
Etna
Paul Yoon's Etna is a war novel narrated by a bomb-sniffing dog making the long walk back to the coastal farm he was taken from as a puppy. It runs barely 200 pages, told in flat, unadorned sentences and lands harder than novels three times its length. Literary fiction about home, and what peace actually costs.
From the review
Etna recalls what has happened to him the way a dog truly would: he worked, traveled, killed, men died, and then there were more men and the work began again. Yoon lets that list run flat intentionally, never raising his voice, and that's the entire point. At first glance it appears simplistic. Read it again and you realize you're inside a mind that has lost the ability to rank one trauma above another. War novels rarely get that close to numbness without having to explain it. He's taken at ten months from a farm near the sea, picked out of a litter of puppies by a woman in uniform named Soojin, who explains that he's to be trained for war. Soojin can hear dogs. That is the one suspension of disbelief you're asked to accept, and you truly should, because it pays back with interest much later when you learn what Soojin was carrying with her at the time. The war itself transpires in just a couple of scenes across four years. It's portrayed as a blur, which is precisely how it would sit in the memory of someone who endured it without ever being told the plan.
Read the full review →As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.
