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.
The trek home is where the novel does its best work. The sense of smell carries the book. Tone, caution, memory — all of it reaches him through his nose before his eyes. Kindness is a recurring theme, often offered by people whose own houses are rubble, and it's the most persuasive argument this novel makes about anything. If I had one genuine complaint, it's that the last act comes faster than I wanted. There were strangers here I'd have willingly followed another thirty pages. Yes, I'm complaining that a book about loss declined to give me more to lose, and that speaks to how impactful this short read can be.
Why you should read
- Spare prose that trusts you to feel it yourself
- Animal narrators written for adults, never cutesy
- War stories told from the edges instead of the front
- Short literary novels you can finish in one sitting
What to expect
- Flat, declarative sentences carrying enormous weight
- Four years of war compressed into a handful of scenes
- A middle stretch that wanders before the last act
- Grief handled without sentimentality or melodrama
Etna believes he is walking toward the farm where he was born. In actuality, he's walking toward a memory of himself that existed before anyone taught him how to kill, and no amount of ground covered can ever return that innocence. Yoon doesn't state it. He simply steers Etna in front of humans who also came home, all of them rebuilding on the false assumption that the war ends when the shooting stops. A man Etna meets uses Etna's survival as his own evidence. If this dog survived, then so can we. It is a small, ridiculous, entirely human piece of arithmetic. Yoon lets him keep it, and I'm so glad he did.
