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the Complete Review
the complete review - fiction



Cold Enough For Snow

by
Jessica Au


general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

To purchase Cold Enough For Snow


Title: Cold Enough For Snow
Author: Jessica Au
Genre: Novel
Written: 2022
Length: 95 pages
Availability: Cold Enough For Snow - US
Cold Enough For Snow - UK
Cold Enough For Snow - Canada
Pour qu'il neige - France
Kalt genug für Schnee - Deutschland
Tempo di neve - Italia
Un frío de nieve - España
from: Bookshop.org (US)

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Our Assessment:

A- : very nicely done

See our review for fuller assessment.



Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
The Age . 5/2/2022 Declan Fry
Financial Times . 5/2/2022 Baya Simons
The Guardian . 3/2/2022 Imogen Dewey
The Guardian . 26/3/2022 Catherine Taylor
New Statesman . 18/2/2022 E.Peirson-Hagger
The NY Times Book Rev. . 13/2/2022 Tobias Grey
El País . 27/2/2024 Patricio Pron


  From the Reviews:
  • "It is a book about palimpsests and what, like snow melting, runs together and washes away in the stories we tell. (...) Although nothing in here purports to be autofiction, it has the elegiac, memoiristic quality of that form's close antecedent, the Japanese shishosetsu or "I novel". Like two of its great exemplars, Natsume Soseki and Shiga Naoya, Cold is melancholy and elusive." - Declan Fry, The Age

  • "Au's prose is precise and finely grained (...). This makes the occasional imprecision (...) feel deflating, disillusioning even. Furthermore, her close narration style and a lack of dialogue give rise to a sense of claustrophobia: what is not being said ? My frustration recalled the title: a cold day made tense by waiting for the sky to break." - Baya Simons, Financial Times

  • "Au's calm, unrelenting focus would be hard to take over a longer book -- but this novella is graceful and precise. (...) Cold Enough for Snow is filled with meticulous observation (.....) The stories, memories and images Au puts on the table escape easy conclusions" - Imogen Dewey, The Guardian

  • "Despite Au's clear, direct prose, these individuals communicate as if under water, and water is an ever-mutable symbol for a relationship which, from the outset, appears equivocal and cryptic (.....) This clever, phantom-like work eludes definition." - Catherine Taylor, The Guardian

  • "(Q)uietly deft and moving (.....) As these evocative scenes fall together, any semblance of her mother's form begins to break away, until the reader is left wondering: who is this woman talking to ? Is her mother really there at all ?" - New Statesman, Ellen Peirson-Hagger

  • "Au avoids specificity (.....) Au's novel, written without any chapter breaks, deftly uses stream of consciousness to explore the legacy of inherited family traits and the difficulty of breaking away. Au creates a ghostly atmosphere through omission" - Tobias Grey, The New York Times Book Review

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Cold Enough For Snow is a short novel -- under a hundred pages -- in which the nameless narrator recounts a trip she takes to Japan with her mother. They live in separate cities and countries now and: "had never really been away together as adults, but I was beginning to feel that it was important, for reasons I could not yet name". Her mother had grown up in Hong Kong, but never been to Japan; the narrator had visited once before. Her mother goes along with it, but the narrator does note that leading up to the trip:

Whenever I'd asked her what she'd like to visit in Japan, she’d often said she would be happy with anything.
       They travel in October -- before it is cold enough for snow ... (snow being something the mother has never seen) --, meeting at the airport in Tokyo. They spend some time in the capital, and then also travel to Ibaraki, where the narrator is eager to see Ando Tadao's Church of the Light (though in keeping with the unnamed character of almost everything in the novel, Ando is only identified as "a famous architect" and the structure merely as a church, though the narrator then closely describes it when she visits). The narrator had also: "planned a walk along an old trail, through forests and towns and mountains that had once joined the imperial cities", but because of the persistent rain realizes it would be too much for her mother, and so she undertakes the mountain hike on her own, leaving her mother at a local inn for the night. After that they head to Kyoto, before then getting set to head to the airport to go their separate ways.
       Interspersed in this loose travelogue are longer sections of reminiscence and reflection as well, the narrator thinking about her mother's life in and relationship to Hong Kong, about her own sister -- a doctor near whom their mother now lives --, and Laurie, her partner (who had accompanied her on her one previous visit to Japan).
       Despite the clear, close description, of both present and past, a sense of uncertainty pervades the entire text; typically, when the narrator recounts (at some length) how she had studied classical Greek literature at university:
By the end of the year, I had written many words on these texts, and now knew them as confidently as anyone else. I too mentioned them in conversation, I too could be confident, and my thoughts felt rapid and full. But all the same, I felt that there was something else, something fundamental, that I did not understand.
       Nameless, the narrator also remains in many ways shapeless, readers left to form a picture from the limited experiences she relates -- how and what she recalls and reveals. And when for example, she mentions that when she was still a student:
My boyfriend often joked that I was the kind of person who would be happy in a mountain temple, told only to sweep the dust from the floor each day, to contemplate the nature of time and labour, and the difference, or absolute sameness, between a dirty surface and a clean one.
       readers must judge for themselves whether that was an accurate assessment or rather how she likes, or liked, to think of herself.
       Cold Enough For Snow is also a novel about a mother-daughter relationship, at this stage in their lives, with the narrator repeatedly seeing her mother anew -- often in noticing how she has aged but also even finding at one point: "When my mother finally appeared, she might as well have been an apparition".
       Near the end, the mother asks her daughter -- a writer -- about her work, and the narrator explains:
It was only in this way that one could go back and change the past, to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been, or rather as we saw it. I said, for this reason, it was better for her not to trust anything she read.
       Suggesting also, of course, what this exercise may have been for her (and just how trustworthy it might be ...).
       Early on, the narrator describes an evening out in Tokyo:
Though we were in the middle of the city, it was like being in a village. This was one of the experiences I liked most about Japan, and, like so many things, it was halfway between a cliché and the truth. It's beautiful, I said, and my mother smiled but it was impossible to tell if she agreed.
       The passage nicely captures the ambiguities that haunt the entire work -- and the novel's simple, precise prose reflects this sense of 'beauty' the narrator refers to here. And while perhaps it is indeed only halfway between something and the truth, the understatedly evocative Cold Enough For Snow is a lovely piece of work, offering no easy, pat answers or explanations.

- M.A.Orthofer, 20 November 2024

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Links:

Cold Enough For Snow: Reviews: Jessica Au: Other books of interest under review:

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About the Author:

       Jessica Au is an Australian author.

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© 2024 the complete review

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