Review of COLD ENOUGH FOR SNOW by Jessica Au

 3 Stars

A reader looking for a plot should avoid this novella because virtually nothing happens.  The unnamed narrator and her mother visit Japan; they see some sights, share some meals, visit some art galleries, and go home.  We are given no direct conversation between the two.  What we are given is the narrator’s memories of her childhood, her time at university, and her work in a restaurant when she was a student.  Some information is given about her sister, uncle, and partner. 

The character who remains elusive is the mother.  At one point, the narrator states, “When my mother finally appeared, she might as well have been an apparition.”  The older woman seldom speaks and never explains her decisions or choices; most often she just smiles or nods.  The woman’s reticence is obvious; when asked what she thought of a work of art, “she looked up at me in a brief panic, as if called to give an answer to a question she did not understand.”

The purpose of the trip is not made clear; the daughter just feels “it was important, for reasons I could not yet name.”  It does seem, however, that she is looking for a way to connect with her mother.  She wants “to feel fluency running through me, to know someone and to have them know me.”  The two do not seem to be close; there’s always a formality between them.  She certainly knows little of her mother’s life.  At one point she speaks about pentimento, “an earlier layer of something that the artist had chosen to paint over.”  This suggests her wanting to know her mother, to find hidden traces of her behind her composed exterior. 

One of the daughter’s problems is that she struggles to see her mother as she is in the present because she remembers her as more youthful.  She looks at paintings and realizes “Each showed the world not as it was but some version of the world as it could be, suggestions and dreams, which were, like always, better than reality and thus unendingly fascinating.”  She has “the same image of her as [she] had throughout [her] childhood.”  The daughter planned the details of the trip and included activities that tire her mother, making her walk more than is comfortable. 

Of course she is her mother’s daughter.  Since “parents were their children’s fate,” the narrator realizes, “if I had a daughter, she would live partly because of the way I had lived . . . and she would have no choice in that matter.”  Like her mother, she is reticent to open up to others; she is more focused on wanting to please others and “living according to a certain strictness . . . to be contained and capable at all times. . . . I made a concerted effort to be efficient and elegant, conscious of my gestures, my voice, the expression on my face.”  That is exactly the opening description of the mother:  she is dressed in clothes “chosen with attention to cut and fit” and she carries herself with poise and elegance. 

At the end of the trip, the daughter feels, “We had said, it seemed, so little of substance to each other these past weeks.  The trip was nearly ending, and it had not done what I had wanted it to.”  Yet she realizes her mother is an old woman who may need her help and will someday die and perhaps what’s important is being in each other’s company “and to have no need for words.”

At times the novel is vague without specifics.  Where the mother and daughter live is unknown.  Why is there no mention of the husband/father?  At other times, things are described in meticulous detail:  “the path was like a corridor, surrounded by trees on either side, tall and spirit-like . . . The earth smelled cold and rich, like the bottom of a well, and the path wound steeply upward, wet and muddy in places. . . . The water as it poured down the rocks was bright and white, like salt.  . . . On a rock near my feet, there was a tiny frog, the same color as an autumn leaf.”   Reading the novel is like the daughter trying to read her mother:  some scenes are “strong and definite, while others bled and faded, giving the impression of vapor.” 

I’m glad this book is a novella.  I appreciate what the author was trying to do, but I found it tedious after a while.  Just as the two characters don’t quite connect, I didn’t quite connect with them.  As a reader, I always felt removed from them, and though that may be the point, it’s not an engaging approach.