ETNA

Yoon’s latest is a contemporary Odyssey as experienced and told by a bomb-sniffing war dog.

After a brutal conflict in an unnamed country, our title character—impelled by an instinct he only dimly understands—leaves his damaged fellow soldiers and wanders through a blasted landscape toward his coastal-village home. Along the way, Etna encounters ruin and danger everywhere: insurgents, drones, unexploded ordnance. He encounters an old blind dog, living alone in a field of carnage that used to be a farmstead, who subsists on tins of meat scavenged from a train wreck and punches open, bloodily, with his teeth; a kindly couple who provide medical care to refugees both human and animal; and a young and vulnerable city dog who becomes Etna’s friend, aide, and sidekick. Then there’s Soojin, the woman who recruited, or rather conscripted, Etna into the military and gave him his name, and who has, perhaps uniquely among humans, the ability to communicate with dogs and to read or anticipate their thoughts. The prose is often lovely, and Yoon captures well the dog’s stoicism and loyalty, its ability to live in the moment and not even entertain the questions that lie beyond the possibility of knowledge. This is a novel in part about navigating desolate, dangerous landscapes, physical and otherwise, until you find a place to rest, a place where hope—to this point wisely set aside, not even considered—might grow.

Spare, lyrical, often moving—but it doesn’t fully avoid the sentimental traps of having a canine narrator.