![]() ![]() Like most tests, it isn’t exactly relaxing: you want to prove yourself to be as careful as the narrator, and yet you expect to fail. As a reader, it’s easy to feel, in passages like this one, that your own brushstroke-detecting ability is being tested. The average viewer might not be able to detect them, but painstaking specialists can. Later, the daughter speaks knowledgeably to her mother about pentimenti, layers of brushstrokes hidden beneath the surface of certain old paintings. It’s an ethic: noticing is equated with caring. It looks like asphalt, but isn’t-it’s “a series of small, square tiles, if you cared enough to notice.” This is more than a habit. In the very first scene of the novel, she describes a sidewalk with almost scientific specificity. The narrator prides herself, above all, on being a keen observer of her surroundings. This approach to literature suggests an approach to human relationships: that it is by acquiring knowledge about what people have been through that we come to know them best.Īt times, Au seems to be encouraging this very approach, teaching us to read her book the same way the narrator reads her mother: by watching closely for clues about backstory, waiting for the moment when it finally reveals itself as the story. In otherwise loosely plotted narratives, such treasures keep us digging-that is, keep us turning the page. ![]() It might be good, she suggests at one point, “to stop sometimes and reflect upon the things that have happened, maybe thinking about sadness can actually end up making you happy.” Hint, hint, Mom.īuried secrets and repressed memories are common storytelling devices, the supposed treasures that many atmospheric novels of consciousness use to entice readers. But, other than a vague impression of “poverty and family and war,” the daughter knows little about this past. Or maybe it will be found in the mother’s past-her emigration from Hong Kong many years earlier and the family she left behind there. The joint vacation came about, the daughter says, because she “was beginning to feel that it was important,” for reasons that she “could not yet name.” Maybe the answer lies in the pointed absence of the narrator’s father, who is never mentioned. But it’s hard for the characters-much less the reader-to say what that something might be. We never find out where either character is travelling from, or much about the lives that await them upon return.įrom the start, there are signs that mother and daughter are dancing around something. Along the way, she shares a few memories: of a creepy patron at the Chinese restaurant where she worked as a waitress of the otherworldly allure of a beloved college professor’s house of her first visit to the home where her husband grew up. ![]() The daughter narrates in calm prose that evokes the sound of a rake carefully tracing a pattern in sand. This is just about all the surface action in “ Cold Enough for Snow,” the slim and sly second novel by the Australian author Jessica Au. They take walks, ride trains, visit art galleries, eat in restaurants, and shop for gifts. A mother and daughter meet in Japan for vacation. ![]()
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