'A cold snow', two pebbles on a path

Portrait of the author Jessica Au.NICHOLAS PURCELL (SIRUELA)

At the beginning of the year I had suggested that he accompany me on a trip to Japan.

We no longer lived in the same city, and we had never explored other places together as adults,” explains the narrator.

Her mother was born in Hong Kong, but she had to move to Australia, where she managed to raise and educate her two daughters.

That they are a family could be a reason for dispute if it were not for the fact that what

A Snow Cold

postulates , correctly, is that we will never fully know our parents, that they will always keep things to themselves that they do not know that their children want to know about. them and maybe they don't even remember.

A family, Jessica Au suggests, is a conversation.

And the narrator of this novel speaks in English, but her mother has Cantonese as her first language and, thus, there is something that escapes in the communication between the two women that not even the intimacy of a trip together could give them.

Jessica Au lives in Melbourne and published

Cargo

, her first novel, in 2011.

Cold

Enough

for Snow

in the original will be published in 18 languages ​​and has allowed her to obtain most of the literary prizes awarded. in Australia right now.

Perhaps this is because it takes place in Japan, a country that, even today—think of Wim Wenders' latest film, the excellent but perhaps somewhat misleading

Perfect Days,

for example—is presented to us as the reverse of the way we live.

“Didn't it seem incredible that there had been people capable of observing the world—leaves, trees, rivers, grass—and seeing its motives?” the narrator asks herself while she visits a museum with her mother, enters several bookstores, goes to houses. tea and art galleries, go on an excursion through the forest alone or remember: a brother's early disappointment in love with his mother;

the two trips her sister made to Hong Kong, on one of which she met her future husband;

the time the narrator worked as a waitress;

a professor of ancient literature and the gesture she had with her that changed her life;

a relationship;

She visits her husband's father.

There is something contemplative in all this that sometimes throws the author into the arms of a school objectivism: “I put on some slippers and went to the ticket office to pay.

The ticket clerk took my bills and gave me the change in coins, as well as two tickets and two brochures printed on pretty white paper,” etcetera.

But what redeems this novel is its reflection on art—so important to the narrator—and the way in which it, in her words, “shows the world not as it is but [as] a version of how it can be, insinuations and dreams better than reality (…) and therefore infinitely fascinating.”

And it is also redeemed by that relationship between a daughter who wants to penetrate a secret that her mother may not have and a mother who, like many of them, is simply happy in the company of her daughter.

They travel through Japan like “two pebbles on a path” that “a broom pushes forward,” and there is something especially moving about the fact that the only way the woman has to communicate with her daughter is through reading the horoscope.

“In the hidden corners of the soul, anything could exist,” the daughter thinks.

But for the mother, the daughter has no secrets: “People born on the same day as you are idealists in their youth.

To be truly free, they need to accept the impossibility of their dreams, and therefore undergo a cure of humility, only then will they be happy,” she recites.

And then she reads out loud her own sign.

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