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Jessica Au’s prize-winning novella is melancholy and elusive.Credit:

Au’s novella,which won the inaugural Novel Prize,reprises the theme of absent mothers and parental distance,but the larger focus is on the fragmentary nature of perception and identity. It is a book about palimpsests and what,like snow melting,runs together and washes away in the stories we tell. Au returns repeatedly to the notion of art as something illuminating,if not always trustworthy – or only trustworthy in a metaphysical,rather than material,sense. She seems to suggest that things do not need to have really happened or be understood “correctly” in order to be true.

Although nothing in here purports to be autofiction,it has the elegiac,memoiristic quality of that form’s close antecedent;the Japaneseshishosetsu or “I novel”. Like two of its great exemplars,Natsume Soseki and Shiga Naoya,Cold is melancholy and elusive.

Themes of being a guest,both in one’s own life and country – and in the lives and countries of others – recur as the narrator contemplates hospitality in classical Greek literature,her family’s past in Hong Kong,acquaintances and friendships in (what appears to be) Australia and,of course,her foreignness in Tokyo.

Au’s narrator has succeeded in passing the hurdles of the middle-class grind,only to find that she inwardly has no real understanding of herself or others.

She reflects on the notion of making one’s presence on earth “as light as possible”,on being mindful and aware of the quiddity of things as simple as “a scarf as blue as the cobalt of Delft tableware” (inCold,blue stands for contemplation,as well as distance from worldly objects and perhaps one’s own identity). As in many examples of theshishosetsu,Au’s narrator has succeeded in passing the hurdles of the middle-class grind,only to find that she inwardly has no real understanding of herself or others,as though she were a spectre for whom “there was something else,something fundamental,that I did not understand”.

Yet Au’s narrator feels,not so much burdened but relieved by her loneliness;it becomes a pleasure and source of freedom to be alone,close to the raw materials and information of existence.

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au.Credit:

All Au’s narrators to date have been outsiders. In Cargo,this dissociation took the form of a search for escape;here,there is no escape,only the ambiguity of being caught in between.

“I thought,too,of how my mother’s first language was Cantonese and how mine was English,and how we only ever spoke together in one,and not the other.”

Our narrator says she wants “to know someone and have them know me”,a feeling that seems connected to her sense of distance from her mother. We learn of her uncle’s reclusive life in Hong Kong,but even these details,her mother suggests,might be wrong – a coy sleight of narrative hand. Her mother,too,“having saved nothing from her own childhood”,appears enigmatic and dislocated.

Au invites considerations of the relationship between parent and child,how the birth of the child stands,on some level,for a growing awareness of our mortality and generational inheritance:“My lecturer had said to us once that parents were their children’s fate[...] I knew that if I had a daughter,she would live partly because of the way I had lived,and her memories would be my memories.”

One of the novella’s neat turns lies in how precisely and matter-of-factly it narrates events that are – as we come to realise – anything but. Au is fascinated by the question of knowledge,especially the knowledge shared – or not – between two people.

InCargo,she wrote,“Everything[…] is a matter of seeing – like the warp of an object placed carefully underwater,so clear from some angles,yet so strange and shadowy every other way”;here,the sentiment becomes:“perhaps it was all right not to understand all things,but simply to see and hold them.” This is perhaps a little too pat;more a truism than a philosophical revelation.

IfCargo recalled Winton,the voice here feels a lot like Rachel Cusk inKudos, pondering the nature of mortality and withheld knowledge. There is the sense,too,that as Au cultivates her own voice – one that could belong to no one else;a voice she seems so far to have withheld from us,if not herself – we will see the full emergence of her talent. It’s a journey that may require,not only the thought and solitude Pessoa felt comprised our most interesting journeys,but something more,and I can’t wait to see it.

This review is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund and the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas

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