Victorian Premier's Literary Awards
They've announced the winners of this year's Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, which include "the overall Victorian Prize for Literature, Australia's richest single literary prize worth $100,000" -- which went to Veronica Gorrie's memoir, Black and Blue; see also the Scribe publicity page.
The prize for fiction went to Smokehouse by Melissa Manning; see also the University of Queensland Press publicity page.
“[Y]ou’ve probably noticed that I’m interested in details. Not themes, not big ideas, not messages, but details. Some readers only care about the story, some are more interested in structure and the overall shape of a literary work, I myself pay attention to details: descriptions, images, metaphors, motifs, some subtle gestures or moments of things left unsaid . . .”
But We’re Living in a Backward Age'
Like the narrator fine-tuning the aperture on her Nikon camera, Au seems to say, we have to choose our scale, what we pay attention to. The narrator, hunting for deeper significance, is shadowed by the possibility this choice might just be random. She envies Laurie’s ability to “see things that others might miss”, and alerts herself to the “small details” in Japan’s subdued museums, bathhouses, bookshops. Glazed ceramics, fabrics, leaves, paintings: meaning floats to the surface, then scatters, as on rippling water. She takes her mother to an impressionist exhibition in Tokyo, full of “paths and gardens and ever-changing light, [showing] the world not as it was but some version of the world as it could be, suggestions and dreams.”
Jessica Au’s slim, spectral novel Cold Enough for Snow…deftly uses stream of consciousness to explore the legacy of inherited family traits and the difficulty of breaking away.—Tobias Grey, The New York Times
Quiet and crisp like a clear winter morning…a world of melancholy and dissolving identity.—Shane Anderson, 032c
Au’s is a book of deceptive simplicity, weaving profound questions of identity and ontology into the fabric of quotidian banality….What matters, the novel reassures us, is constantly imbricated with the everyday, just as alienation and tender care can coexist in the same moment.—Claire Messud, Harper’s
On a trip to Japan, a mother and daughter circle each other quietly. There is no tension, no snap, but every exchange — about souvenirs and restaurant menus and their childhood memories — is laden with pressure, a potential missed opportunity for bonding…Cold Enough for Snow observes the invisible thread between parent and child as it twists and knots and occasionally goes slack.—Hillary Kelly, Vulture
Flawed understanding, consolation, and insufficiency all infuse this compelling, unsettling novel reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts or Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy. A beautifully observed book, written in precise, elegant prose that contains a wealth of deep feeling.—Kirkus (starred review)
Rarely have I been so moved, reading a book: I love the quiet beauty of Cold Enough for Snow and how, within its calm simplicity, Jessica Au camouflages incredible power.—Edouard Louis
Jessica Au is a new talent to be watched.—Romy Ash, Australian Book Review
Au’s writing ebbs along effortlessly and poetically.—The Australian
By Jason Steger
Jessica Au concedes that she is a slow writer. Her first novel, Cargo, was published nearly 11 years ago when she was 25, so it’s not surprising that despite conceding light links between the two, her prize-winning novella, Cold Enough for Snow, is a different kind of book.
“Cargo was probably a work where I hadn’t found my voice yet. It does take you a while to do that. At that time of my life I hadn’t read as widely, I was quite young, and it has a slightly more imitatory style.”
She has certainly found a distinctive voice if Cold Enough for Snow is anything to go by. It is the inaugural winner of the Novel Prize, an international award that guarantees the winner simultaneous publication in Australia, the US and Britain. The biennial prize was set up by Giramondo here, Fitzcarraldo Editions in Britain and New Directions in the US.
Giramondo associate publisher Nick Tapper says it is designed to honour fiction in English that does similar aesthetic adventuring to that often seen in fiction in translation. It received more than 1500 entries and Au’s novella was chosen from a six-book shortlist. Although Tapper had anticipated potential disputes during the judging, he said the process had proved harmonious and the choice of Cold Enough for Snow was unanimous. Au’s book has this week received an enthusiastic review in The New York Times and by novelist Claire Messud in Harper’s.
The narrator of Cold Enough for Snow is a daughter meeting up in Tokyo with her mother, who lives in a different country. It is the first time they have travelled together as adults. They visit various galleries and museums, they shop, they eat, and they walk or travel by train. The reader learns more about the mother’s childhood in Hong Kong, and more about the narrator’s life in what the reader assumes is Australia and her view of her life and the art they look at, but not much seems fixed. Can the narrator be trusted?
It is a strangely beguiling book written in a tightly controlled prose that seems to contrast deliberately with its almost diffuse narrative that flits between past and present (and briefly into the future). Au, who is based in Melbourne and is a former deputy editor of Meanjin, says one of the things she wanted to delve into was the notion of truth.
“I am always aware that I don’t think there is an objective truth, ever. And I wanted to point that out in the story. But conversely, with writing all you can do is strive towards an emotional truth which does create a sense of recognition, hopefully, between you and the reader.“
And what’s the truth of the writing of the book. On the one hand, Au says it started 10 years ago as its basis was a short story she wrote soon after Cargo. On the other, it was the year before the pandemic, and then she wrote it in about three months.
I used the Japan travel story with the mother and daughter as the central frame and then in a strange way all the things I’ve been working on in the past 10 years came in as digressions – the story about the uncle, the part where the narrator is a waitress. They’re all very different, but they did end up fitting in once it had the container of this particular consciousness.“
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There is a Japanese influence, too, in the new confidence of her voice. Before writing the novella, she read a lot of 19th and 20th-century Japanese writers such as Yasunari Kawabata, Junichiro Tanizaki and Natsume Soseki.
“There is a sense of indirectness to the prose in the Japanese novels and there’s a lot of polite conversations going on on top, and it seems very lovely and beautiful but actually if you listen hard enough, the author is leaving you a lot to work out about what goes on underneath that. I think that sort of indirect layeredness rather than any deception was closer to what I was trying for. I like prose that leaves the reader to work it out as you go along.“
After finishing the novel, Au did actually take a trip to Tokyo with her mother. And no, it wasn’t a question of life imitating art. She says it was lovely and fun.
Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au review – a graceful novella about how we pay attention
Cold Enough for Snow — a finely observed tale of role reversal
In Jessica Au’s second novel, a trip to Tokyo is the backdrop to a tense recalibration in a mother-and-daughter relationship
At the start of Cold Enough for Snow, Jessica Au’s slim, beautifully simple second novel, the unnamed narrator, in her twenties, has just arrived at the airport in Tokyo to meet her mother. As she waits, she buys “two tickets for one of the express trains, as well as a bottle of water and some cash from the ATM”. This inversion of the conventional parent-child dynamic — here child as caregiver and financial provider, parent as passive recipient — establishes the novel’s gentle focus: the recalibration that takes place in a mother and daughter’s relationship during the shift from childhood to adulthood. We observe this over the course of their holiday to Japan, following an itinerary of art galleries, museums, bathhouses, cafés and shops, each one carefully selected by the daughter, punctuated by the narrator’s and mother’s memories.
Au’s first novel Cargo, published in her homeland of Australia in 2011, was a slight yet amorphous coming-of-age novel about a group of teenagers growing up in a coastal town in southern Victoria. In the decade since Cargo was published, Au’s characters have aged by around the same number of years. Her writing has matured to a disproportionately greater degree.
Au’s close narration style and a lack of dialogue give rise to a sense of claustrophobia: what is not being said?
Where Cargo displayed her skill for depicting strange relationships but suffered from an underwhelming plot, Au’s new work, which has won the inaugural The Novel Prize (jointly offered by indie publishers New Directions, Fitzcarraldo Editions and Giramondo), shows that she has learnt to play to her strengths. By largely doing away with plot — the trip goes without a hitch — she finds momentum in the closely observed oscillations of a single relationship.
Au plays out the complexities imposed on this relationship by different educational and cultural backgrounds; while the daughter was highly educated in Australia, her mother less so in Hong Kong. Prompted by a question from her mother about her book about Greek myths, the narrator recalls studying them at university, her excitement at entering this intellectual world, and her obsession with intelligence: “much later I realised how insufferable this was: the need to make everything pointed, to read meaning into everything”.
We learn that she has not quite outgrown this impulse. When she asks her mother what she thought of an avant-garde exhibition, “she looked up at me in a brief panic, as if called to give an answer to a question she does not understand”. Out of all the galleries, monuments and sights, it is at a small stall, where she selects socks to give as presents, that her mother appears happiest.
Au’s prose is precise and finely grained (in a jewellery shop, we’re informed of “the gentle, satisfying clink of her gold watch against the glass”). This makes the occasional imprecision — an unexplained switch in subject, a simile that doesn’t land — feel deflating, disillusioning even. Furthermore, her close narration style and a lack of dialogue give rise to a sense of claustrophobia: what is not being said? My frustration recalled the title: a cold day made tense by waiting for the sky to break.
Relief does come. Returning from an arduous walk taken alone, the narrator goes to look for her mother in the town, finding her carrying a bag of “rice, hot curry”. When “she recognised me, her face broke out with warmth”. Back at the hotel, her mother presents her with a pair of woollen socks which are “very large and new and bright red”. From the anxious purchase of the train tickets at the novel’s outset, the daughter is at last able to accept this act of care: a reciprocal coexistence has formed, and an arc emerges. The narrator has passed through the defiant independence of youth, past the urge to repay or prove, and into adulthood.
Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au, Fitzcarraldo Editions £9.99, 104 pages/New Directions $14.95, 144 pages
