There was a lot packed into this short book.

First, the beautiful descriptions of place and things have to be acknowledged. I haven't been to Japan, but if it looks as described, I want to go. The little things are vivid, yet sparsely described. This is a rare talent, and I appreciate the author's ability.

Then there is the mother-daughter relationship. It is clear that they love each other, but the question is: at what point in time is this set? It could be that this may be a trip the daughter took on her own, in remembrance of her mother, as she is cleaning her (possibly deceased) mother's home at one point. Is this love real, or is it a desired relationship on the part of the daughter?

The immigrant experience is also described in spare, but haunting prose-here the mother and daughter world views are very different, yet also similar in many ways, and hints to their relationships: to themselves, each other, their family and their surroundings.

This little book is very haunting, thought-provoking, and very much re-readable. I look forward to more from Jessica Au.

Thank you to the publisher, Fitzcarraldo, and to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book is a quiet and haunting debut where traces of memory and the many invisible threads between people and moments are brought to the surface.

We look at the world through various snapshots of a mother and daughter, with moments and stories sitting alongside crystal-clear flashes of senses and feelings, and the result is something really quite beautiful.

For a book as short as this, it manages to build an incredibly layered and rich story, whilst still feeling like the narrator is gently walking through life and telling the story at her pace, always reaching for something just beyond her.

This book is a great reminder of what Fitzcarraldo does excellently- finding those odd stories that feel like they sit between fiction and non-fiction, and giving them the space to breathe.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

what an extraordinary novella, not only gorgeous prose on every level but also giving me the sense of feeling lighter than I felt before. And wiser. The narrator is intensely observant of both her environment and her inner worlds. She describes her family in ways that aren't always complementary but that are always full of love. Au perfectly channels the sensibility of a young person trying to understand the world in a deeper way. The novella reminds me of other recent favorites including Three O'Clock in the Morning by Gianrico Carofiglio and Optic Nerve by María Gainza--if you loved those, then you will love this--but it has a, well, the best word for it really is 'love'--it has a love of life and language and for me catapulted it beyond even these great favorites.

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au is a short novel about a mother-daughter relationship, art, travel, the immigrant experience.

I read Cold Enough for Snow in a sitting; I loved how poetic it is, and Tokyo as the setting is always gorgeous. A mother and daughter visit Tokyo during a rainy season. They walk around the city, take the trains, visit museums and galleries, eat tasty meals in restaurants. And at the same time, they talk about the past, their memories, family, the things they see at the shops, art, literature and many more things. But you can sense that even though they are talking, there are many questions that aren’t asked.

Although this book was extremely short, I found the writing to be too meandering and I didn't want to pick the book up.

Cold Enough for Snow: a wonderful title, and a story which definitely warmed my heart and engaged my intellect in equal measure. This is a first person narration told entirely in reported speech. The rhythm of the prose, its precision, the equal importance it gives to descriptions, reflexions, reported dialogue, and the seamless interweaving of past and present, made it for me a riveting reading experience.
The nameless narrator, a daughter in her 30s, has arranged a trip abroad with her mother, who she sees now rarely as they live in different cities. It is not the first time the narrator has visited Japan, but it will be the first for her mother - a place of neutrality and discovery ideal, she thinks, for getting beyond what she perceives the mundanity/superficiality of their relationship... Who has not tried a trip like this? I have. This novel travelogue takes you through a carefully planned tour of Japan. Cities have been selected, museums, especial buildings, nature trails... I loved the almost namelessness of the places, the small hints (names unnecessary as what was important was described and ruminated in a very succinct yet so resonant manner). A similar approach is taken to the memories of the past which keep creeping in the narrator's conciousness and which prompt an obvious thought: which memories are being entertained by the mother? which were her expectations for the trip? The daughter's thoughts revolve about culture in its widest sense - art, language, work ethic, spirituality... and particularly difference in relation to it and its consumption and appreciation, its dislocating power, thrown into focus by the narrator's immigrant family. Of course, another central theme is the levels of knowability of the other.
I particularly liked of this novella its non-pretentious yet almost elegiac tone, and how it pondered some deep conundrums in our dealings with family and culture in a rather mesmerising manner that brought to mind some French nouveau roman novels. I am looking forward to more from Jessica Au and will be seeking her first novel, Cargo, right now.
With many thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions via NetGalley for an opportunity to read and review this wonderful, intelligent and rewarding novel.

As soon as I’d finished this beautiful book, I wanted to read it again. That’s my ultimate praise really. It’s very short and nothing much really happens, but it’s completely captivating. A woman and her mother spend a few days travelling round Japan: that’s it. It’s a Sebaldian narrative - no dialogue, discursive tangents into memory, reflection, art, personal history, narrated while in constant motion - walking city streets, sight-seeing, hiking, shopping, the narrator caught up in her own thoughts throughout, and an abrupt ending. The mother becomes more of a stranger, she and her daughter separated by language - no common ‘mother tongue’ - and inter-generational cultural shifts which the travels though Japan, the mother’s country of birth, gradually accentuate. The mother is an enigma, always in the background, her actions ambivalent, her feelings and thoughts unknown, her memories unreliable. We see her through a telescope the wrong way round, close but far away. The prose is exquisite, meditative, melancholy: seemingly rambling but on reflection densely packed. Water is the only constant - rain, mist, streams, lakes, tea, soup, just as I remember Japan too. A beautiful, puzzling, evocative read.

A daughter and her mother take a trip to Japan. The story is narrated by the daughter who thinks about their relationship, their lives, and their past. As they travel, their journey is interrupted by memories
The pair have a close yet achingly distant relationship with a dislocation between the generations and their immigrant experiences.
It’s an intense, melancholic read with vibes of Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills. The whole thing feels dream-like and elusive - you never feel like you’re on stable ground. Even the narrator feels unreliable - as do some of the memories. I wasn’t completely sure her mum was with her on the trip (her presence has a shadowy, ghostly feel) or whether the trip happened at all! Does she just wish it had? Things are not as they appear - there is a disconnection. What’s real? What’s imagined or wished for? What’s time? What’s memory? And how do they all link together?
For me, it’s a poignant story of grief and loss. It is beautifully written, simple yet rich - haunting and unsettling. I loved it!
Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC. All views are my own.

A mesmerizing, reflective novel about a daughter and mother's trip to Japan and the branching conversations and memories their time together inspires. This novel portrays the contemplative moments of every day life, when something we see triggers a core memory, and how we can only make sense of our impressions if they are rendered in a new light. This book explores what it means to be known and unknown and the closeness and unbridgeable space between daughters and mothers. The author gorgeously describes several uncanny human moments, bringing a universality to experiences I thought only I have had. While short on plot, I highly recommend if you are in the mood for an interior, beautifully-written piece of art.

Thanks to NetGalley and New Directions for the ARC! I plan to feature this on my TikTok: @alistofreads

I was looking forward to reading this book following the description, especially as I used to live in Japan. While the writing is thoughtful and nuanced, unfortunately for me, I didn't get a sense of story at all. It could have been so much more developed between the mother and daughter and the ending just felt abrupt. I had so many questions throughout and as a reader, I just felt frustrated.

A short and detailed book, with a lot left unsaid - much like the relationship between our narrator and her mother.

A woman and her mother go on holiday together to Japan, after not seeing much of one another in the past few years. The holiday is spent by the daughter reflecting upon their relationship with one another, as well as the daughter's relationship with her own life, past and present. The duo visit exhibitions, go shopping, travel to different cities - we get to know their relationship through these events. The mother and daughter are not the main characters of the book, but rather the mother-daughter relationship. We see the mother through the daughter's eyes, how the daughter thinks the mother is feeling or what she wants to do - as "anything will do" is the response the mother gives. There is one part where the daughter notices her mother wants to go into a shop - the mother does not say so, but the desire is felt by the daughter. The mother-daughter relationship is not the usual type we read in books or see in film - where the mother and daughter are either super close best-of-friends or don't get along. It is very much a bond of relationship in this book, they have a relationship because they are mother and daughter, not despite the fact. They spend an entire holiday together, and we don't know if they talk about any "serious" issues - it could easily be a teenage daughter on a shopping trip with her mother. I could feel the love in the pages the characters had for one another, and it spread through me.

An imagistic and beautifully observed novel, <I>Cold Enough for Snow</I> is illusive, melancholy and suffused with gentle affection. The unnamed narrator has travelled to Japan to go on holiday with her mother, hoping that travelling together will bring them emotionally closer. Little happens in the novel: we move from place to place within Japan, and the author evokes places of cultural significance within Kyoto and Tokyo, as well as capturing small moments of beauty: rain on pavements, umbrellas, the lights of a small restaurant, sharing a meal, pouring tea. We gradually learn some of the background of the mother and daughter: the mother was an immigrant from mainland China to Hong Kong, and then to an unnamed English-speaking country, where her two daughters were born. The daughter has completed a degree in English literature, and is debating whether to have children with her long-term boyfriend, Laurie. These small details seem unimportant, but Au skilfully draws them together, using small moments, such as a child buying a toy turtle, or a young woman working in a Chinese restaurant, to create a sense of the emotional lives of her characters.

At its best moments, this book seems to look at questions we all ask ourselves, about belonging, how to treat one another, and how to cope with life's briefness, while on the surface Au describes a simple mountain walk under wet trees, or a camp stove burning. It also captures the depth of the relationship between the mother and daughter, and how, despite their fondness for one another, they cannot quite be open with one another. I found this short novel deeply engrossing and often very moving. However, at times I was frustrated by the author's focus only on beautiful or atmospheric moments, and her seeming complete lack of interest in anything awkward, ugly or painful. Only very aesthetically pleasing moments were allowed to exist in her world, and sometimes the lack of any contrast to the beauty and poignancy felt stifling, and meant the book lacked emotional charge. However, this is clearly the work of a very talented writer, and I would certainly seek out more of her books.

ARC from Netgalley.

A mother and her grown daughter meet in Japan for a holiday, spending time in Tokyo, Ibaraki and Kyoto. As they visit shrines and other attractions they talk - the daughter, as narrator, also noting what is also unsaid and not shared.

I thought it was a beautiful meandering meditation on family, changing roles within a family, the mother-daughter relationship and also a meditation on memory, identity, of ‘otherness’.

I absolutely loved this novella and will highly recommend to friends.

Huge thanks to Netgalley and the publishers, Fitzcarraldo Editions, for making this ARC available to me for a fair and honest review.

Cold Enough For Snow

A beautifully written, deceptively simple novel about mothers and daughters, the passage of time, and the ways in which we communicate with each other and often miss the mark. Like the title, the prose made me feel as if I were in a hushed, snowy wood and I could hear each flurry drop.

A daughter and mother meet at a train station, and even this description carries weight, “All the while, my mother stayed close to me, as if she felt that the flow of the crowd was a current, and that if we were separated, we would not be able to make our way back to each other, but continue to drift further and further apart.” The book invites the reader in with its quiet reflections and intimate gestures.

At one point, the daughter wants to take a candid photo of her mother with her new camera, but instead her mother poses stiffly, spoiling the moment. She reflects, “I had wanted to catch something different, to see her face as it was during ordinary time.” The author seems to pause each moment of their journey and bring it to life, in time that is ordinary, yet numinous.

Read this is you appreciate well written stories on mothers and daughters, memory and history, travel, museums, good food, and the small but meaningful distances between us. If this novel were a folded piece of paper it would unfold to be an intricate snowflake to hold in your hands.

An elegant, meditative novella with an ending which sent me reeling.

On holiday together the unnamed narrator and her mother 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 - that will reveal true knowledge.

She studies hard. Asks questions. Photographs. But is this the way to enlightenment?

Cold Enough for Snow will appeal to readers of Patrick Modiano and Rachel Cusk. There is little plot, instead the narrative eddies with memory, reflection, and anecdote. But these anecdotes pull weight: in just a handful of paragraphs, Au’s secondary characters come alive, fully inhabiting their moments.

A lovely work of art.

"It was a grey, cold day and we were the only two people in the room. I asked my mother what she believed about the soul and she thought for a moment. Then, looking not at me but at the hard, white light before us, she said she believed that we were all essentially nothing., just a series of sensations and desires, none of it lasting. When she was growing up, she said that she had never thought of herself in isolation, but rather as inextricably linked to others. Nowadays, she said, people were hungry to know everything, thinking that they could understand it all, as if enlightenment were just around the corner. But, she said, in fact 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, shuddering until we either reached a state of nothingness, or else suffered elsewhere."

This observational and meditative travelogue follows a daughter and her mother during a trip to Japan. The daughter is the narrator of the story, often observing in quiet and poetic ways, more often reflecting on her past and current relationships, all while traveling and attempting to understand her mother. It is an exploration of mother-daughter relationships and how complicated they can be. A touching elegy. A reflective and subdued novel. There are a lot of very lovely descriptions of light, which reminded me of Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima. Also, I truly loved that last paragraph! Oof!! That paragraph alone can be a prose poem.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4265064433?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

Perhaps it was all right not to understand all things, but simply to see and hold them.

Cold Enough for Snow left me with a huge lump in my throat! It's such a gentle mediation on art, on love, on being a child of emigrants, on being open to knowledge and new experiences; a mediation on life itself, I guess. But what really touched was the exploration of parent-child relationship when the differences between the two is at times too big to bridge. That moment when a child simply cannot understand his/her parent no matter how much effort is put into it. A coldness that may not be coming from a lack of love, but rather from different life experiences, different upbringings and expectations(something I've seen happening in first generation children born to migrant parents). But also the enormity of the love flowing between mother and child. And that closing line of this novella left me reeling, because I've glimpsed myself that huge hole that sooner or later is gonna open...

This affected me in a dual way: firstly because it reflected so closely my own relationship with my mother, that sometime feels like a complete stranger to me. And at the same time I am the mother of children that are first generation, born to migrant parents. In many ways I understand both experiences, I know the joy and the sorrow!

Cold Enough for Snow begins as a hypnotic travelogue—soothing, almost meditative in its cadences and imagery of a rainy Tokyo—and develops into a haunting, poignant elegy.

Ishiguro-esque (that’s a mouthful) is to me the best descriptor for this slim volume. It reminds me most of A Pale View of Hills and even the titles evoke a similar feeling, like the first line of a haiku. The narrator, an Australian woman travelling with her mother in Japan, is classic Ishiguro: a little melancholy, a little pompous, aloof in a broken, alienated kind of way. Not so much ‘unreliable’ as she is under an illusion; as the story evolves it drops subtle hints at her blinkered state.

Elision is the order of the day here. Unwanted texts, sent by a customer at the restaurant where she waitresses, clearly distress the narrator a great deal but are never described beyond simply ‘messages’. Meanwhile, Au devotes lyrical, attentive paragraphs to a collection of textiles in a museum, porcelain bowls, a hotel room. These are deft choices—what to evoke in precise, elegant detail; what to leave up to the reader’s imaginings—that make this book much larger in the mind than its page count should allow.

This ability to reverberate, to create echoes in the mind and to linger with you after you finish reading, is also reminiscent of Ishiguro’s novels. But Au has created something all her own here, a thoughtful, elliptical work whose uncomplicated prose style belies its depth. 4.5 stars

Jessica Au’s novel “Cold Enough for Snow” indeed exquisitely probes “the possibilities of the form” with an “innovative and imaginative” style as envisioned by the new literary award, The Novel Prize, which it recently received.

It is no surprise that the immediate impressions that come to mind—“elegant writing”, “elegiac atmosphere”, “aesthetic minimalism”—can be found in several reviews by the fellow readers on Goodreads and NetGalley whose reviews I hold in the highest esteem. No need to elaborate them again. I would instead briefly reflect on what I found innovative in this short, but quietly powerful, novel.

On its surface, it’s a story about the short trip that the narrator takes with her mother to Japan which evokes reminiscences and memories about her childhood and the family that emigrated from China to an unnamed Western country (likely Australia as the author is Chinese-Australian), her loving and steady relationship with her boyfriend Laurie, her college years when an inspiring lecturer imparted on her the love for ancient Greek literature, her love of art… But the story is far from linear and the time delicately shifts so that it’s unclear whether the trip is taking place now as presented, whether it’s also a part of the narrator’s memories after her mother had already died, or whether it ever took place and the narrator is imagining the presence of her mother while in fact alone on the journey. To use the metaphor from Au when describing the narrator’s reaction to the Monet haystack painting, there are multiple gazes through which we can see the story.

“I said that I knew very little of Monet […] but in that moment in the city gallery with my boyfriend, looking at the pale light, the great shapes of hay in a field, something had struck me. It felt like the artist was looking at the field with two gazes. The first was the gaze of youth, awakening to a dawn of pink light on the grass, and looking with possibility on everything, the work he had done just the day before, the work he had still to do in the future. The second was the gaze of an older man, perhaps older than Monet had been when he painted them, that was looking at the same view, and remembering these earlier feelings and trying to recapture them, only he was unable to do so without infusing it with his own sense of inevitability.” (pp. 68-9)

Besides her ingenious approach to the fluidity of time as well as the elusive line between the real and imagined, Au also deftly weaves throughout the story the delicate thread of cultural identity, shifting between the narrator’s “Western” identity, though not always as firmly rooted as it seems, and her mother’s Chinese heritage and immigrant nostalgia for her homeland. Again, turning to the arts, there are extensive passages about the narrator’s attraction to the blue and white porcelain which I felt as a metaphor, discreetly presented, for cultural relocation and how much of the heritage is left in the identity of new generations.

At one point, as the narrator “was flipping through a book on East Asian art”, she “read there about how the porcelain had been made for hundreds of years in China, and how it was traded not only as far as Europe, but also the Middle East, appearing in the paintings of Rembrandt van Rijn, or as tablets inscribed with verses from the Qur’an. I read about how, for a long time, porcelain was much prized, in part because the secret to its composition was still a mystery. The wares were exported to Europe and some came to feature Dutch houses or Christian iconography alongside lotus petals and traditional ruyi borders. These, made specially to order, were named Chine de commande. Later, the secret to porcelain-making was discovered in Germany, and England, and Chinese porcelain became less singular and less needed.” (p.40-41)

Not only are the traces of the cultural roots slowly disappearing in the new (hyphenated) generation, as it happened with the legacy of the Chinese porcelain in the Western decorative arts, but it reckons with conflicting loyalties and identities.

“I looked at the little blue and white bowls in our kitchen. We ate regularly out of these bowls. They were exactly the same as the ones in the lecturer’s house, and yet also entirely different.” But then there was the contrast between “a smooth and fluid line” in her lecturer’s house that felt “like certain lessons of history” and “a jumble of colours” in her family house “of which I could not help but feel vaguely ashamed.” (p. 40)

That’s heart-breaking… What is also heart-breaking is the title of the novel, once we learn what motivated it.

“Whenever I’d asked her [the narrator’s mother] what she’d like to visit in Japan, she’d often said she would be happy with anything. The only question she’d asked once was whether, in winter, it was cold enough for snow, which she had never seen.” (p. 85) And it never snowed...

A few words about Au’s imaginative style. The descriptions of the visits with her mother to the museums and restaurants, her walks on the woodland trails, conversations with her sister or boyfriend Laurie, or her waiting tables during her college years, were always attentive to every detail of gestures, speech, surrounding in a simple and lyrical manner that felt like watching long takes in Antonioni’s films, ethereal in their beauty, or slowly meditative movements in the Japanese tea ceremony.

I initially thought to rate it with “4.5 stars” but then wondered, given how enthralled I was reading it, what was amiss to have this margin of “0.5” from the perfect score. I then realized that it has nothing to do with the book per se but with my desire to read it again, to take in more of the magic in the deceptive simplicity of Au’s writing, to pick up more threads that so gently run through the narrator’s meditative storytelling.

My thanks to Fitzcarraldo for an ARC via NetGalley.