Jessica Au Cold Enough For Snow
Jessica Au is a writer based in Melbourne. Her debut novel is 2011’s Cargo. Her latest novel, Cold Enough for Snow is the inaugural winner of the Novel Prize, which will see it published worldwide and translated into fifteen languages.
Cold Enough For Snow begins in transit; the narrator has arrived in Tokyo and awaits her mother’s arrival on a separate flight. They are on a train station travelling to a gallery; moving from a Metro line to a suburban line and then walking through familiarly unfamiliar streets. As the move together the narrator is always conscious of her mother’s presence, testing out their proximity in space as well as time as she thinks back to the near and more distant past.
Cold Enough For Snow’s narrator is searching for something on this trip. She reflects on her mother’s youth in Hong Kong, paralleled with her own Australian upbringing. She wonders at her education that has shifted her perspectives away from her mother’s.
In a very slim volume Cold Enough For Snow covers a lot of ground, both figuratively and metaphorically. The pair of mother and daughter travel around Japan, moving every few days. All the while the narrator is moving through her life and relationships as moments trigger memories.
The narrator’s seeming quest has her reaching for moments and experiences and this is contrasted by the more relaxed aura of the mother who is happy to do anything. In these moments we see the narrator reflect on her education and the sacrifices her mother made to provide it. The narrator wants to return some of the wonder she has discovered but also struggles to put into words what that might be.
The journey of Cold Enough For Snow is both physical and existential and I could have stayed in the pages simply for the vicarious sense of flux and transit (it’s been so long since any of us travelled). The novel also gave me that tension you feel when you can’t quite allow yourself to simply be in a moment, when the conscious mind tears you away and forces you into ruminations and doubts.
The narrator’s mother observes to her that our education and understanding do not necessarily make us happier or improve our world and it is not until much later that the narrator comes to her own realisation; “I had one vague exhausted thought that perhaps it was alright not to understand all things but simply to see and hold them”.
Cold Enough For Snow is beautiful and thoughtful. I’d no sooner finished it than, like any good trip, I wanted to go back and do it all again safe in the knowledge that familiar locations could reveal new secrets.
Jessica Au’s Cold Enough For Snow is out now from Giramondo.
This book review appeared as part of 2ser’s Tuesday Book Club.
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