Review | Cold Enough for Snow, prize-winning existential novel by Jessica Au about a Hong Kong mother-daughter relationship, is delicate and subtle
- How well can we know anyone, especially a family member? That’s the question Jessica Au asks in her Novel Prize winning second novel, Cold Enough for Snow
- The book is a dialogue of sorts between its narrator, an expatriated Hong Kong woman, and her mother in which little is said and a lot inferred, Au explains
Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au, pub. Giramondo Publishing
Cold Enough for Snow, Melbourne-based Jessica Au’s delicate and subtle second novel – or, at 97 pages, perhaps it is a novella – is not big on plot. True, it tells the straightforward story of its unnamed, expatriated Hong Kong narrator travelling in Japan with her mother, who still lives in Hong Kong.
They haven’t seen each other for some years, meet at Tokyo airport, visit art galleries and museums, wander through gardens and tourist spots, wait patiently or impatiently for the other.
Instead, the book – which won the inaugural A$10,000 (US$7,200) Novel Prize in 2020 and is being translated into several languages – adeptly, with exquisite craft, slows down time.
Fiction commonly hurries its readers from event to event and erases the moments between. Au allows each visit or site to conjure a story from memory: housesitting for her lecturer during her studies; how caring for a sick bird led her uncle to romance; of “kayaking across the crater lake near where [her partner, Laurie, had] grown up”.
Memories expand into deeper reflections and contemplations of the narrator’s place in the family – so much unspoken with her mother, tension with her sister, who hadn’t moved too far from the family home – central incidents in their family’s lives, and (from time to time) her relationship with Laurie.
