Cold Enough For Snow by Jessica Au
“Maybe it's good, I said, to stop sometimes and reflect upon the things that have happened, maybe thinking about sadness can actually end up making you happy.”
Winner of the inaugural Novel Prize, Cold Enough for Snow (2022) is a slim, unassuming novella that quietly opens the door to a depth of everyday thoughtfulness that too often passes us by. It is the second book from Jessica Au and has quickly established her as a writer to watch.
On the surface, Cold Enough for Snow is simple in its premise; a daughter has invited her mother on holiday with her to Japan. Both characters remain unnamed throughout, but we learn early on that there is a fracture in their relationship. The daughter has asked her mother several times to join her on this trip until her mother relents - not with enthusiasm - but with a candid acceptance:
“At first, she had been reluctant, but I had pushed, and eventually she agreed, not in so many words, but by protesting slightly less or hesitating over the phone when I asked her, and by those acts alone, I knew that she was finally signalling that she would come.”
While travelling through Japan, they take in art galleries, museums, restaurants and other tourist sights, navigating the transport system together. Every experience is quietly and factually narrated to us with just enough detail to keep us involved but not overwhelmed.
Obvious details are left out throughout. Famous artists go unnamed despite it being clear who they are when their work is described - likewise with works of literature. In doing so, Au has a careful way of inviting the reader to read between the lines, and there are many knowable and unknowable things that fill the lines throughout this story.
Our narrator has a touch of unreliability, as we only see the world through her lens. Dialogue between her and her mother is sparse, often summarised by the narrator on her behalf. She describes the various landscapes and locales they visit together, injecting the experiences with memories from her and her mother’s pasts. The unreliability of memory is explored as she recalls a long story about her mother’s brother and a lost love she believes her mother told her about as a child. When she asks her mother as an adult, her mother tells her no such thing happened, and her sister confirms she doesn’t know the story:
“I asked my sister about the story, but she said she could not remember it either. Later, she said that it actually sounded a lot like a TV soap opera she had watched once in high school.”
Whether intentional or not, Au leaves us with the question of how much truth can be found in our memories and who is in control of that truth - questions that come to be applied to the narration of the narrator's travels with her mother.
The narrator wants to “know someone and to have them know me”, and as the trip progresses, the themes of connection and disconnection become increasingly palpable on the page. The trip seems obsessively planned around experiences that might spark a deeper connection with her mother, and we are constantly left with the narrator’s longing to share thoughts with her mother that she eventually desists from:
“I had wanted every moment to count for something. I had become addicted to the tearing of my thoughts, that rent in the fabric of the atmosphere. If nothing seemed to be working towards this effect, I grew impatient, bored. Much later, I realised how insufferable this was: the need to make every moment pointed, to read meaning into everything. ”
One of the most poignant takeaways from reading this was the ambiguous mother-daughter relationship. It was one I identified with in many ways but have rarely seen detailed with such precision. It’s clear our narrator feels a lack in her life, and she is starting to gain clarity that it might be around the relationship with her mother. We are all aware of close mother-daughter portrayals and the importance of this relationship, but it’s not something our narrator has been able to achieve with her mother.
Despite this seeming want for a deeper relationship, our narrator doesn’t meet her mother where she’s at and who she is in reality, rather than some motherly ideal. At one point, she leaves her in a small town, booking her into a hotel before taking off to complete a day hike through a forest that leads her back to the town. Her first reaction is one of relief:
“As soon as the train left the station, I felt a sense of relief. I wanted to walk in the woods and among the trees. I wanted not to speak to anyone, only to see and hear, to feel lonely.”
When she returns to the hotel, her mother is nowhere to be seen, and the man at the desk doesn’t recall seeing her - insisting that only the narrator checked in the night before. Our narrator heads outside to look for her:
“She walked towards me very slowly, with no clear sense of recognition on her face, as if I were a ghost she did not want to meet. In her hand she's she carried a white supermarket bag. I could smell the rice, hot curry.”
In an interview with Verity La, Au mentioned she likes “subverting narrative expectation … open endings, scenes in which nothing happens yet everything happens”. Cold Enough for Snow is the epitome of this, a novel that seeks to share the different ways we can be recognised and unrecognised by those around us and how we, in turn, recognise and unrecognise them. It’s a rare book that everyone will be able to find a piece of themselves within.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
