A Review of Kim Chinquee's Snowdog

Kim Chinquee’s flash collection is a fantastic display of brevity and brilliance. The book is divided into three parts, each of them focusing on recurrent characters, including humans and dogs, and their relationships during a certain period. The dogs reflect the main character’s emotions, and bring into the book some playfulness and some heartbreak.

The complexity of the love relationships introduced in Part I is well expressed in the “Dogfight”. One phrase reveals a history, “We survived him buying an old house in the woods, me selling my new home, us moving in, each with our two dogs, into this new one.” In this flash, the last line opens a world of horror, saying “I see the blood in her ears.” In fact, last lines are among the highlights in the collection. Another startling last line ends the flash “Snowstorm”, saying, “Some days, I felt I was made of plastic…I watched the girls. They put the babies in the water, dunking them and then raising them up again.”

Double-entendres enrich the readers’ understanding as they create parallels between the physical world and the couple’s life together. For instance, in “Foxy,” a flash dealing with health-related and emotional problems after the woman’s hysterectomy and the man’s injury, reads, “He veers onto an exit. There’s a bump in the road.”

However, while most flashes tackle emotional difficulties, others, such as “The Dog Smells Like Peppermint” are sexy and/or humorous.

Part II introduces another couple, but the main character’s sense of discomfort continues. The couple enjoy a rediscovery of their old love, but soon run into problems. She cannot detach herself from her life in her city, when she spends time with him. In “Old Toast” she says, “I think about my home in New York, what I might do if I were there, on my own, whose shirts I would iron, whose lawn I would mow, whose dinners I’d be making. Things I’d do for myself.” Several flashes clarify, each from a different angle, that she likes her own company, and possibly prefers it to living with the man. The flash “Airfare” solidifies it toward the end of this part, saying, as her departure approaches, “He said, ‘Honey, but I love you.’” After her plane lands, she tells herself, “You’re home now.’”

Part III is somewhat different from the previous ones. The main character moves into a new neighborhood, where she tries to find her standing. Here, too, however, nothing is easy nor simple. “Lucky” shows her desperate attempt to find common ground with the new neighbors. She and her neighbors are “in many ways alike, though maybe different by our hair and skin. By our preferences and sizes. By probably our blood types and sleep patterns and the things we like to eat and with whom we choose to partner.” There is hope here, humor and worry. She cares for her garden, but she also says, “I used to kill every plant I owned.”

Dogs are mediators with the world, with other people. In the moving flash “Luck” the narrator holds her dog on her arms, like a trophy. Unfortunately, the dog cannot fulfill the expectation. “His paws curl and his body trembles.”

The main character’s identification with dogs, a thread that goes along the collection, becomes ever clearer.  In the second part the character’s name is Elle. In the third part she is Ellen. She says, in the flash “Rescue” that “Ellen’s Chihuahua’s name was Elle. Ellen has been with Elle for seven years.”

There is mourning for Elle in one flash, but there is a new dog and renewed hope as well in the flash that ends the book. “I wondered if he (the dog Spiff) smelled the death smells—my uncle died there…Years before, my grandma died in her sleep…But people were also born there…”

In the third part, the author writes about childhood, among other things. The readers can identify the source of the character’s sense of danger in her early days. In “Wear Your Seatbelt,” the narrator remembers her father’s mental illness and mentions the mother’s habit to tell the daughters repeatedly, “Wear your seatbelt. Wear your seatbelt. Wear your seatbelt. Wear your seatbelt.”

Back at the farm where she grew up, for the last farewell, the narrator’s sense of reality is shaken: “But on this night a storm came. It blew everything all over.”

Many types of yearnings fill these pages. Of the strongest ones is the longing for the faraway son, who’s serving in the army. He appears in the first and the third part, always described with affection and care.

Another recurring subject is the determination and solidarity of athletes. The character’s team, unsurprisingly, gets a name related to dogs and is compared to dogs. “We panted. We said woof. We brushed our teeth on the sidewalk.”

This is a small book that accomplishes a lot in its preciseness and insight.