It sure wasn’t cold enough for snow the evening Minervans met to discuss Jessica Au’s mesmerising, award-winning novella Cold enough for snow. Indeed, the day had been an unseasonably warm 28°C, and we kept a door open to the outside all evening.
A slim book, Cold enough for snow made quite a splash when it hit the stands in 2022. It was the inaugural winner of The Novel Prize, unanimously chosen from 1500 entries. It also won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, and has been shortlisted for other awards.
It revolves around a holiday in Japan organised by a daughter for herself and her mother. They walk, and travel by train; they visit shops, cafes, galleries, churches and temples, the things you do in Japan. As they do they talk, but mostly the daughter reflects on their relationship and on the things in her life that affect this and other relationships. It is told in the first person voice of the daughter. The back cover blurb concludes with “Au creates an enveloping atmosphere that expresses both the tenderness between the mother and daughter, and the distance between them” which is as good a summation as any.
First impressions
Our First Impressions were more variations-on-a-theme than our usual range of likes and dislikes, so I’ve summarised them here rather than listed them in our usual way.
The most common response offered as we went around the group was “enjoyed it”. Other words used were gentle, meditative, elegant, understated, atmospheric, evocative, strange, and mesmerising.
Most of us also commented on its being a book you couldn’t read in short bursts, on its requiring concentration, because of its digressive structure and because of its details. For one of us, there was a moment where the language felt tedious, but it didn’t last.
Some also touched on its overall meaning. What was it about? The ending was a surprise. This we talked about more during our discussion.
It’s a puzzle (Minervan)
Cold enough for snow is more digression-driven than plot-driven, so we can be forgiven for also meandering around many ideas and issues in our discussion. Further complicating our having a coherent discussion was that some of us had read it many months ago so had to talk our way back into it.
One person quoted the line in the book from when the daughter is looking at some art. She describes it as having a “forgotten quality, like things glimpsed and remembered through the window of a speeding train” (p. 21). Our member suggested this could also describe how the book feels.
Another member thought that setting it in Japan was appropriate, because it is a paradoxical country in which bustle and stillness can exist side by side. And she thought the autumn timing also worked because autumn can feel like a season of reflection and change.
We talked a lot about what we thought the book was about, and how we personally interacted with it. We thought about the daughter and how in some senses she comes across as feeling confident and needing to do things for her mother, whereas her mother mostly comes across as self-contained and not uncertain. There is a sense that the daughter is trying to find her life, including confronting such issues as whether she should have children. When she house-sits for her lecturer, it feels like she is soaking up a different life which feels just out of her reach. She says she felt as though she was “living my life from the outside in”.
Her relationship with her partner, Laurie, seems to be a positive one. One member was intrigued by the meaning of a moment when she mentions that he had emailed her about setting up an area for hanging plants, but they’d talk about it when she got back (p. 80). What did this signify?
Looking at the book through a migration-story lens, we thought Au was portraying the difficulty of two people experiencing the world in different ways. We felt that her mother had wanted her daughters to assimilate into the new country (Australia) while the daughters were frustrated about not understanding the mores of the home culture. One digression tells of the sister being taken back to Hong Kong as a child for a funeral, and feeling “deeply adrift”, because she understood nothing. We thought the book could be partly exploring that migrant experience of longing for the past life but wanting also to live in new one.
We also talked about the fact that the novel is told through the daughter’s first person voice, so when she conveys a sense of her mother’s uncertainty or insecurity she could very well be expressing her own. We never know directly what the mother thinks, but we do know that the daughter is looking for something more from her mother.
It was in our discussion about the mother and daughter and their relationship that our perspectives diverged the most – albeit gently, just like the book! Each of us had a differently nuanced understanding of their relationship. Throughout the book, there is a sense of the daughter’s frustration that she can’t create the intimacy she wants from her mother, that her mother is not giving her what she wants. We talked about whether this was a cultural or generational thing. A bit of both probably. The daughter didn’t have the words to bridge the gap with her mother, but the mother either didn’t see this or it didn’t matter to her? We also realised that most of us thought more about our relationship with our mothers when reading this book, than with our daughters.
The holiday was to include a long walk through forest and old towns, but her mother had not brought the hiking boots her daughter had asked her to. The daughter at first “wanted to push” her mother to do the walk anyhow, but she thinks better of it, and does the walk alone. There is also the interesting question of the title. The only real thing her mother had expressed interest in whenever the daughter had talked about planning the trip was snow, but that wasn’t going to happen with a trip planned for autumn! Did the daughter ignore this one wish of her mother’s when she planned the trip, and does the ending mark a recognition in the daughter of tending to her mother’s needs?
We talked about other scenes in the novel, such as the restaurant scene with the demanding Chinese man who can’t read her feelings about his dominating her time when the restaurant was busy. Her reaction was to feel he had “taken something” from her (p. 70-71). Regarding this and other memories our narrator shares, one member commented that we often use holidays to ruminate and reflect on our lives, though when the narrator is travelling alone on her walk she says “alone, I could not seem to move my thoughts” (p. 80).
We concluded this was a cleverly written this book, in that our reactions and our interpretations seemed to draw (more than usual) from our specific personalities and relationships, and from where we placed ourselves in terms of the mother-daughter relationship. We thought about this idea from the book:
My lecturer said to us once that parents were their children’s fate … I knew that if I had a daughter, she would live partly because of the way I had lived, and her memories would be my memories, and she would have no choice in that matter. (p.88)
What did this mean for her as a daughter?
Our overall response to the novel was that we couldn’t pin it down, that it feels nebulous, ethereal. We rather agreed with the narrator who, at the end of her sole walk in the mountains, says:
I had one vague, exhausted thought that perhaps it was all right not to understand all things, but simply to see and hold them.
How long we will hold onto the ideas we found in this book, who knows, but it is surely one that each of us could pick up again and find something new in it. A good book and discussion.
Present: A respectable 7, having – extremely unusually – brought the meeting forward a week due to a subscription concert clash on our scheduled night.
Minerva Reads ACT 