Cold Enough for Snow

December 6, 2021
Chinese Australian writer Au’s hypnotic debut follows a Chinese mother and daughter during a vacation in Japan. The pair meets in Tokyo and carries on simple conversations as they visit museums, stroll in parks, shop for souvenirs, and have meals during the seasonal typhoon rains. The daughter narrates, examining her mother and their relationship as she observes both her mother’s behavior and the way that she has aged since they last saw each other. Yet despite the simplistic nature of the story, its meandering nature invites the reader to wonder what has really brought these two women together—and whether the mother is there at all. The narrator remembers stories the mother told her as a child about the mother’s childhood in Hong Kong, such as about the narrator’s reclusive older brother and lost love from his youth—only the mother now claims the details are all wrong. Some readers will find their patience tried by the vague Tokyo episodes, but Au exquisitely conjures the family’s nebulous past, and is at her best when folding in the perspectives of other family members. Once this probing and surprising text catches hold, it leaves the reader with lingering questions.

Starred review from December 15, 2021
In Australian author Au's deceptively simple second novel, a mother and daughter meet in Japan to spend time traveling together. On a rainy October day in Tokyo, a woman gently shepherds her undemanding mother toward a museum. Their trip unfolds, interspersed with memories from the narrator's life, past conversations, and musings about her mother, who grew up in Hong Kong and immigrated to another country before her children were born. The two are kind with each other, almost formal, but not close. A muted sense of frustrated hope hangs over their interactions, a thorny knot of longing and despair. Toward the end, in a rare moment of intimacy inside a church they are visiting as tourists, the daughter asks about her mother's beliefs: "She said that she believed that we were all essentially nothing, just series of sensations and desires, none of it lasting...there was no control, and understanding would not lessen any pain. The best we could do in this life was to pass through it, like smoke through the branches, suffering, until we either reached a state of nothingness, or else suffered elsewhere." To this the daughter makes no reply. "I looked at my watch and said that visiting hours were almost over, and that we should probably go." The trip does not succeed the way the narrator hoped. And yet: "It occurred to me that by the age I was now, my mother had already made a new life for herself in a new country...I tried, and failed, to imagine her first months there. Had she been homesick? Had she been awed by the streets, the brick and weatherboard houses, so different to her own home? Had she been worn out not by the big changes, but, as is often the case, by countless smaller ones--the supermarkets that were so well stocked, but where you could not buy glass noodles, or the right kind of rice?" Early on, in a phone conversation, the narrator's sister says that her young daughter wants to wear the same dress every day. All the sister can do is "to make her something warm for dinner, to look on her in flawed understanding, and console in all the insufficient ways." Flawed understanding, consolation, and insufficiency all infuse this compelling, unsettling novel reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri's Whereabouts or Rachel Cusk's Outline Trilogy. A beautifully observed book, written in precise, elegant prose that contains a wealth of deep feeling.

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November 10, 2021
Cold Enough for Snow is Jessica Au’s second novel and the winner of Giramondo Publishing, Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions’ inaugural Novel Prize. The book’s narrator travels with her Hong Kong-born mother to Japan, a destination she has chosen both for its foreignness and cultural semi-familiarity, and which she hopes will put them ‘on equal footing in some way, to both be made strangers’. The exact purpose of the trip remains elusive, but it is clear from the beginning of the novel that some fundamental part of their relationship is at stake. As the two visit galleries and museums, shops and gardens, a cemetery and a bathhouse, they communicate by way of opinion, memory and gesture, rather than by directly addressing any emotional concerns. The reader is left to interpret a wake of silence, in which lie entire histories of misunderstanding, uncertainties and unspoken truths. Au’s prose is elegant and measured. In descriptions of bracing clarity she evokes ‘shaking delicate impressions’ of worlds within worlds that are symbolic of the parts of ourselves we keep hidden and those we choose to lay bare. Put simply, this novel is an intricate and multi-layered work of art—a complex and profound meditation on identity, familial bonds and our inability to fully understand ourselves, those we love and the world around us. Jacqui Davies is a freelance writer and reviewer based in South Australia.