Jessica Au’s novella Cold Enough for Snow (New Directions, 2022) is a delightfully executed miniature that depicts the distance between a mother and daughter through the latter’s recollection of a shared journey to Japan. The mother remains an opaque mystery to us, while the daughter – within whose perspective we are trapped – comes across as oddly callous. Take, for example, the end of the first chapter, in which the pair visit a museum. The narrator marvels at some textiles, before eventually finding her mother waiting for her outside:
I asked her if she had seen the fabrics and she said that she had seen a little of them, but had become tired, so was waiting for me here.
I wanted for some reason to speak more about the room, and what I had felt in it, that strange keenness. Wasn’t it incredible, I wanted to say, that once there were people who were able to look at the world—leaves, trees, rivers, grass—and see its patterns, and, even more incredible, that they were able to find the essence of those patterns, and put them to cloth? But I found I could not. Instead I said that one of the rooms on the top floor, which looked down into the garden and across into the trees, had been designed for contemplation. You could slide open the window and sit at the narrow desk and watch the stones or the trees or the sky. Maybe it’s good, I said, to stop sometimes and reflect upon the things that have happened, maybe thinking about sadness can actually end up making you happy.
p. 8f.
At first, we are predisposed to be sympathetic to the narrator. Faced with her mother’s radically different experience of the museum, she feels blocked, incapable of sharing her epiphany, which is genuinely engaging. Yet somehow she is still desperate to connect with her mother, for which purpose she invents another (banal, false) epiphany. Too embarrassed to reveal what she really thinks, knowing that her mother’s temperament is so misaligned with her own, she then tries to drown the resultant awkwardness in chatter.
Yet the fabricated revelation also shows something of the daughter’s attitude towards her mother. Sensing that her words would be wasted, the daughter reaches after something trite. Does she perhaps think this is what her mother might regard as profound?
This implicit condescension is one of the novella’s most striking effects. It invites the reader to participate in the narrator’s reflections, even to take them as beautiful – yet immediately undercuts them, re-embeds them in a context that renders them self-regarding and narcissistic. The narrator enjoys her own thoughts a little too much, and fails to mask her sense of superiority.
Three types of unreliability
The narrator of Cold Enough for Snow is classically unreliable. We are sealed within her perspective, but it is clear that this narrator fails to see what is in front of her: her mother. Au’s psychological dramatizations enact that blindness.
I want to discuss the possible extent and implications of this unreliability. The key passage is a kind of “flash-forward” to the mother’s death, which comes to the narrator while she is hiking. Knowing that her mother is too weak to undertake the route, she travels by train to a nearby town then walks back towards her:
I passed by a river and two small waterfalls, whose sound was almost indistinguishable from the rain. The water as it poured down the rocks was bright and white, like salt. I thought of nothing and no one. On a rock near my feet, there was a tiny frog, the same color as an autumn leaf. The trail continued to wind through a combination of villages and mountains. I disappeared in and out of the forest like a character in a book. From a house high up on a hill, a medium-size dog, its coloring somewhere between a fox and a coyote, with its tail curved upward, watched me go by. I thought of my mother, and how some day, in the future, I would go with my sister to her apartment, the one I had never seen, with the single task of sorting through a lifetime of possessions, packing everything away. I thought of all the things I would find there—private things like jewelry, photo albums and letters, but also signs of a careful and well-organized life: bills and receipts, phone numbers, an address book, the manual for the washing machine and dryer. In the bathroom, there would be half-used glass vials and jars of creams, signs of her daily rituals that she did not like anyone else to see. My sister, I knew, ever methodical, would suggest we sort things into piles: things to keep, things to donate, things to put in the trash. I would agree but, in the end, I knew I would keep nothing, whether out of too much, or too little sentiment, I did not know.
p. 78
How are we to take the temporal grammar of this passage? There are three possibilities, each suggesting a different degree of unreliable narration.
- Straight: The narrator, speaking in the present, simply tells us what her past self was thinking at that time. The events are speculative, and it is not clear whether things actually did come to pass in this manner before the moment of narration. The fact that this first-person narration is in the past tense is purely conventional, and nothing is to be made of a potential gap between the moment of narration and the events narrated.
- Flash-forward: The narrator, speaking in the present, throws in a prolepsis: the narration is of actual events that have occurred and are known to the narrator, but which are presented out of order. Grammatically, of course, the narrator does signal that the mother’s death is, at this point, merely a matter of speculation (“I thought […] how some day, in the future”). But a seed of doubt is thereby planted in the reader’s mind: perhaps this prophecy has since been fulfilled. Perhaps the mother has now died, and the narrator, speaking in the present, is recollecting her journey in full knowledge of her mother’s death – maybe as an attempt to come to terms with it? The temporal gap hence implies another form of motivated narration and adds another layer of unreliability.
- Radical unreliability: An absurd extension of the above. What if the mother is already dead? What if the whole journey is imagined or hallucinated? What if the lack of interaction between mother and daughter is because she is already a ghost, and so on? I don’t seen any real grounds for this reading, but if you assume a first-person narrator is insane, you can’t rule anything out.
Let’s ignore the “radical unreliability” reading and focus on the “straight” and “flash-forward” readings.
Collapsing distinctions
I want to argue that, while the “straight” reading may seem the less interesting of the two, it is in fact the more compelling. Or rather, I want to claim that the “flash-forward” reading is wholly unnecessary, and that it is already contained within the “straight” reading.
At issue here is the value we attribute to the novel’s continuous references to the mother’s coming death. Au repeatedly casts the mother as a spectral figure throughout. Some of these moments are perhaps a touch too obvious:
When my mother finally appeared, she might as well have been an apparition. She came with her puffer jacket zipped up to her chin, and in the cold night air her breath came out in a little cloud, like a small departing spirit.
p. 86
Yet at other times the mother’s inevitable death is hinted at more tenderly, such as in the gesture that closes the work:
As I approached, she saw me and made a gesture with her hand. Could you help me with this? she said, and I saw that she was unable to bend down far enough to reach her shoe. I knelt and, with one swift tug, helped her pull it on.
p. 95
What is the quality of this “inevitable” death towards which the novella so obstinately points? Is it something that has definitely happened, as in the “flash-forward” reading? Or is it merely something that will definitely happen? Does it matter which?
I think it does.
To view the narrator as unreliable in the second (“flash-forward”) fashion is to lose sight of the meaning of seeing death inscribed within life. It is to see that inscription only retroactively: the narrator is mentioning these things because the mother has died, and now that she is recounting her tale, she is preoccupied with it throughout. This form of unreliability ultimately implies a reading in which the narrator is, in a sense, a master of her discourse. She coincides with the author: hinting, yet cunningly withholding one key piece of information.
By contrast, taking the narrative “straight”, we can see the inscription of death in life as something that can be perceived and felt in the present. Retrospect itself (of the first-person narrator speaking in our present) is not important. Rather, what is at issue is the anticipated retrospect of the moment present in narration (“I thought […] how some day, in the future”). The question is no longer how the certain knowledge of the mother’s death colours a retrospective narrative, but instead how the inevitability of the mother’s death determines the relationship between mother and daughter in the narrated present.
The end of subjective experience, death inevitably points to the distance between subjectivities: between those that live on, and those that die. To know that the mother will die is to know that she is a finite subject, separate unto herself, and likewise to know that the time in which that separation might be bridged – in whatever ways (art, nature, conversation) we might approximate it – is with each minute drawing to a close.
The daughter sees it, and yet she does not see it: “she said that she had seen a little of them, but had become tired, so was waiting for me here.” She narrates the hint for us, yet does not herself take it. Rather, she becomes frustrated with her mother and fails to grasp the quality of their separateness, attributing it to small-mindedness, not to the ultimate index of her fatigue.
Living contexts
In this drama of distances, where daughter fails to meet mother, the pathos arises from the narrator’s classical unreliability – how she fails to see things that are there on the surface. This effect is negated if we view the narrator and author as complicit in a textual game. Of course, there are passages that hint at such a reading:
As we walked, she asked me about my work. I didn’t answer at first, and then I said that in many old paintings, one could discover what was called a pentimento, an earlier layer of something that the artist had chosen to paint over. Sometimes, these were as small as an object, or a color that had been changed, but other times, they could be as significant as a whole figure, an animal, or a piece of furniture. I said that in this way too, writing was just like painting. It was the only way that one could go back and change the past, to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been, or rather as we saw it. I said, for this reason, it was better for her not to trust anything she read.
p. 93
Yet is this not just another example of the narrator’s superficial cleverness? Her desire to perform a thought for her mother, and for us? To take this passage as a key to the novel is to miss the unique manoeuvring of Cold Enough for Snow‘s discourse: its constant positing of enunciation within context, its prodding us to ask what motivates the narrator’s reflections, and using them to indicate the abyss between her and her mother.
The novella tempts us to deconstruct it, but also warns that this is exactly what the narrator would want.
In this moment of doubled self-reflection, Au uses the idea of a textual game to point us back again to a “straight”, and more human, reading.
The film opens with a sentimental sequence of shots showing Louise Banks, a linguistics professor, playing with a child. The child is shown at various ages, but we also see her dying young in a hospital. The sequence initially seems like a flashback. In the present, twelve alien spaceships appear on earth. Louise Banks is invited, along with Ian Donnelley, a physicist, to assist the military personnel who have surrounded the ship on American soil, Banks to aid in communicating with the aliens and Donnelley to question them about their technology. They meet the aliens, known as “heptapods,” in their ship’s antechamber, where they stand separated from them by a glass screen. Banks begins deciphering the aliens’ language, in which entire sentences are written with single signs, or “semasiograms.” It appears that the aliens have a different perception of time from humans. 
lexipenia 