Jessica Au - Cold Enough For Snow (Fitzcarraldo, 2025) ***½

Australian author and bookseller Jessica Au wrote an interesting and memorable novel with "Cold Enough For Snow". The plot is not very exceptional: a daughter and a mother meet in Tokyo, and decide to visit the city and enjoy time together. Interestingly enough, there appears to be a kind of communicative disconnect or distance between both characters. We get a very good insight into the pscyhology of the daughter who is the narrator, but more often than not she meditates, reflects, and even philosophises yet rarely in a dialogue with her mother, who despite being physically present the whole time, often appears to be totally absent at the same time. The paragraph below gives a good example of this imbalance, when both visit an art museum: 

"I turned to my mother, who was still looking at the Monet, which happened to be one of his most famous pieces. She was swaying lightly on her feet, as if to music, or as if very tired. I said that I too sometimes did not un­derstand what I saw in galleries, or read in books. Though I understood the pressure of feeling like you had to have a view or opinion, especially one that you could articulate clearly, which usually only came with a certain education. This, I said, allowed you to speak of history and context, and was in many ways like a foreign language. For a long time, I had believed in this language, and I had done my best to become fluent in it. But I said that sometimes, in­creasingly often in fact, I was beginning to feel like this kind of response too was false, a performance, and not the one I had been looking for. Sometimes, I looked at a painting and felt completely nothing. Or if had a feeling, it was only intuitive, a reaction, nothing that could be ex­pressed in words. It was all right, I said, to simply say if that was so. The main thing was to be open, to listen, to know when and when not to speak". (p. 43)

Her writing is precise, precious even, as is the description and development of the story itself. It's not boundary-breaking but worth looking for.