Marchpane's Reviews > Cold Enough For Snow

Winner of the Novel Prize 2020

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.

To me, ‘Ishiguro-esque’ is 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, almost like a line of 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