Cold enough for Snow - AgaIn

 I could not finish reading this book, actually I put it away very quickly.

I asked ChatGPT how this book could/should be received by an old male reader with European background - the answer below.
Note: I italicised fragments with which I do not agree.

There are books that speak to us in loud, unmistakable voices—books that assert, explain, declare. Then there are books like Cold Enough for Snow, whose voice is quiet, almost ghostly, but persistent. Jessica Au’s novella is a soft, snow-covered path winding through memory, culture, and the quiet, often unreconciled spaces between generations. For a man of European descent who has lived long enough to see the world change several times over, the book felt like a whisper across the years, both foreign and achingly familiar.

The story follows a young woman traveling in Japan with her mother. That is the plot, in the loosest sense. But what Au offers is less a narrative and more a meditation—on identity, language, family, and the way time softens and distorts everything we try to hold onto. It reminded me of the works of W.G. Sebald or even the mood of late autumn European poetry: sparse, elegiac, composed.

Though I grew up in post-war Europe and Au’s narrator is of Asian descent, our concerns overlap in unexpected ways. The disconnection between parent and child—something sharpened by migration, generational distance, and unspoken emotion—feels deeply familiar. In my own family, I recall similar silences, the heavy pauses that carry far more than any sentence. It struck me that while the specifics differ—different countries, different wars, different migrations—the emotional terrain is nearly identical.

The prose is spare but precise. I admired that. Too many modern books seem to chase attention with fireworks. This one sits beside you and waits. There’s a passage where the narrator wonders whether we ever truly understand another person, even our own mother.
That line stayed with me. At 78, I’ve buried both of my parents and still find myself wondering what parts of their interior lives I never glimpsed, what histories they carried quietly to their graves.

I will admit, this is not a book for everyone. There is no plot to speak of, no dramatic revelation or climax. But there is grace here, and a kind of moral stillness that I found moving. For readers like me—who have lived long enough to know that clarity rarely arrives in a blaze of light, but rather in soft accumulations—Au’s novella feels like a small, solemn gift.

In the end, Cold Enough for Snow reminded me of walking in a strange city on a grey winter morning: slightly lost, full of reflection, and at peace with not having all the answers.