Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au
An elegant, meditative novella with an ending which sent me reeling.
“I had one vague, exhausted thought that perhaps it was all right not to understand all things, but simply to see and hold them.”
In Jessica Au’s 94-page novel Cold Enough for Snow, the narrator invites her mother to Japan for a holiday. They bimble around Tokyo, Ibaraki, and Kyoto, pottering through shops, museums, and galleries. The narrator reflects on art, memory, and the engineering of artlessness. She tries to photograph her mother in unguarded moments - but her mother is too quick: composing her features and hiding herself behind poise.
And here is the narrator’s great frustration: she wishes to seize and understand the essence of the world around her. To see through Monet’s brushstrokes, through Greek prose, through sculpture, through nature even, to a hidden core under all the craft - a secret pentimento - which will reveal true knowledge.
She studies hard. Asks questions. Photographs. But is this the way to enlightenment?
“…it was almost like how painters had once used the camera obscura: by looking indirectly at the thing they wanted to focus on, they were sometimes able to see it even more closely than with their own eyes.” (30)
Jessica Au’s finely-tuned prose will appeal to readers of Patrick Modiano and Rachel Cusk. There is little plot; instead, the narrative eddies with anecdote and reflection. But these discourses pull weight. In very few strokes, Au’s secondary characters come alive, fully inhabiting their moments.
“I said that in this way too, writing was just like painting. 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.” (93)
The narrator wanders through cemeteries and sips noodles. She recalls undergraduate days, house-sitting, a job waitressing. She thinks of home, and contemplates having children.
“Before each shift, I always pinned back my hair very tightly. I did this not because I wanted to, but because I felt somehow that this style, elegant and strict, suited our role, which was to be contained and capable at all times.” (63)
Cold Enough for Snow gives great counsel on writing. It cautions not to overwork material, but to pare down: summoning likeness with the minimum strokes, leaving space for interpretation and dialogue. The figure of the sculptor, Laurie’s father, is key: the way he engineers balance and cultivates precise details - seeming to place them artlessly. The magic of art is in the careful creation of artlessness, of the ordinary, of the natural: of apparent simplicity and truth.
The scene with the innkeeper knocked me out of my chair, making me want to reread the whole book looking for entirely different signs. A lovely work of art.
Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in February, 2022.
Many thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions, Jessica Au, and NetGalley for my advanced reading copy.
