3 Little Books
Cold Enough for Snow, Of Mice and Men & The Dead
I’ve been reading slowly lately—primarily because I’ve been reading a lot of incredible books (like this one and this one) and also because I’ve been a busy girl. This is not a problem per se—I don’t believe in rushing through books, or reading challenges, or anything of the sort, but I do try to write about…the books I read…for you…here, and that means I have to read them. Inquiring minds may wonder, but Eve, why don’t you build up a back log of reviews so that you’re not always under the gun?? An excellent inquiry, to which I can only reply, that ain’t me.
I have no intention of being any less busy this month (happy December by the way—the best & busiest month of the year!). And I also don’t want to stop reading incredible books because…why would I ever do that? I decided there was only one place for me to turn. The shorties!
So, in the course of the past ~week I read three novellas. I know technically “The Dead” is a short story, but it’s a long short story, and I’m trying to simplify here. If that’s not getting back on the good old rapid reading track (whatever that even is), I don’t know what is (I don’t know anything). All three of these were quiet and measured—calm on the surface, with a whole lot going on down below.
Without further ado, three little books for you. <3
Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au
95 pages
This slim volume is a novel that I bought the last time I spent a month reading 100 page books. I didn’t get to it then, so I’m getting to it now. It tells the story of an unnamed daughter (our narrator) and her mother on a trip to Japan together. We don’t know where they live now, but they no longer live in the same city. The daughter decides “for reasons [she] could not yet name” that it would be important for them to go on a trip together as adults. The mother is resistant to the idea but eventually relents.
As the pair explores Tokyo and some of the surrounding area, we get little glimpses into who they are and what their relationship is made of. The mother is from Hong Kong. The daughter is not. She is from some unidentified but United States reminiscent country that her mother immigrated to shortly after getting married. Much of the novel centers upon the things that live and the things that die between generations.
Our narrator repeatedly highlights how little she feels she knows about her mother and her mother’s family. In one instance, she recounts a story about her maternal uncle that her mother told her years ago. It is one of the few stories she knows that makes her feel like connected to her mother’s youth, but when she shares this memory of a memory, she is told that none of it ever happened. The novel is full of these moments of disorientation and blindness, and we experience, with our narrator, the quiet desperation to bridge the gap that exists between the face her mother presents to the world (including her) and the inner depths of experience and emotion that must surely be there. The quiet desperation exists in tandem with empathetic acceptance.
Interestingly, this sense of distance and detachment is enhanced by the narrative voice. Our narrator herself is quite closed off. She is measured and still and smooth on the surface, but she does have an inner life—she does. There are moments when she reveals something, or rather, when something is visible just below the half-translucent film of detachment. She shares little glimpses of her real life, with her boyfriend—and I found myself wishing she would share more, but she restrains herself. Perhaps, along with a sense of frugality so intense that the leftovers of every meal must be finished, this self-enforced curtaining off of emotion is one of the things that does live on from generation to generation.
Honorable mention for the passage where the mother extracts a book that describes one nature based on their date of birth (I’m picturing this book1, though I imagine a smaller version must exist for travel), and our narrator muses:
“I thought that some of it was true and some of it was not, but the real truth was how such things allowed someone to talk about you or what you had done or why you did it in a way that unraveled your character into distinct traits. It made you seem readable to them, or to yourself, which could feel like a revelation. But who’s to say how anyone would act on a given day, not to mention the secret places of the soul, where all manner of things could exist?”
This pretty much sums up how I feel about horoscopes and love languages and enneagrams and all the rest of it. There’s nothing wrong with them if you use them as a jumping off point for self discovery, but they’re worthless unless you’re willing to do the actual work of knowing yourself, painful, and frustrating as it can be.
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
107 pages
I had never read this book before, which is baffling. Nearing the end of Cold Enough for Snow over Thanksgiving weekend, I went to a thrift store with my family and bought a crystal punch bowl with 12 little crystal cups, three Hemingway novels with pretty matching bindings, The Charterhouse of Parma (anyone read it?), and this. I wanted to read Of Mice and Men in my previously mentioned month of short books, but after I ordered it for pickup from the Strand, I got a disappointing email telling me they actually didn’t have it, and did I want to wait indefinitely for it to come in or cancel the order?
I let it go, took it as a sign, canceled the order, and figured that when it was time, it wouldn’t be hard to find somewhere else (or even at the Strand). So, last weekend there it was on the shelf, and I took it as a sign again. That’s how I decided to read it right away, and also to find one more short little book to read and write about (see below), rounding out this post, which I thought would be short, and is now shaping up to be quite long. Ha ha will I ever stop talking about how I thought I’d be able to keep it short but failed? No.
For those like me, who have made it through life without reading this one, we have the tale of George and Lennie, two laborers in Depression era California beginning work on a new farm. George is slight, quick-witted and bitter. Lennie is bulking, strong and mentally disabled. George watches out for Lennie and tries to take care of him. They have a dream—a hope—of one day saving up enough to establish their own little property, where they can work the land and live happily. A place where Lennie will stay out of trouble. Well-intentioned Lennie is very strong (without knowing his own strength) and easily frightened—a combination that results in a lot of trouble.
The book reads like a play, which makes the fact that Steinbeck himself adapted it into a play not all that surprising. The result of this tone was twofold for me. First, it made me feel like I was reading for a high school English class. It just has that vibe, though I know there’s a little bit of a chicken-egg element at play there. High school English class isn’t a bad thing, but it is a thing. The second result was that I could picture it all very, very clearly—like I was in the room. The tension, the discomfort, the powerlessness and the power.
To be honest, at the beginning, in the face of all of that, I wasn’t sure this novel would be my cup of tea. I think those uncertain feelings were prompted by the characters, and the setting, and the language, but also by my personal relationship with books that make me uncomfortable and how I go about determining whether the discomfort I feel is good and pleasant or bad and…bad. I shouldn’t have worried though—I was in good hands. The discomfort and the tension of the novel ultimately culminates in a release—not quite catharsis by the classical definition, but something close to it.
There’s simply no one who does it the way Steinbeck does it. I finished it in a day. He’s just that good.
The Dead by James Joyce
75 pages
The last little book that I chose to round out this missive was plucked off the top shelf of my bookshelf because its skinny spine caught my eye—“The Dead”! I have a strange little edition of it, separated out from the rest of Dubliners with explanatory notes because I had to read it in college for a class, though I can no longer remember which one. I do remember not particularly caring for it, though it would probably be more accurate to say that I made no effort to engage with it at the time. There’s not a single annotation in the margins, not a single word underlined. Tsk tsk.
It seemed like as good a time as any to give it another go. People do seem to like it, after all. In fact, it was a better time than many, as we close in on the Christmas season. This story is a hat and a scarf and a pair of mittens. Rosy cheeks. It made me excited for the cold just in time for the first truly cold days here in New York. Serendipitous.
We have the story of Gabriel Conroy—or rather the story of his aunts’ Christmas party through his eyes. The bulk of the action takes place at this party, and the reader is set down into a rather quotidian scene. Aside from the special occasion—ringing in the new year—this is a group of family and friends, gathering together to fend off the cold with the warmth of each other’s company. There is snow in the air, which is somewhat special too, as we learn that it doesn’t usually snow so much in Ireland. Aside from that though, Joyce’s realism amounts to a lot of temporally specific bits about life in Dublin, and what statues are where, and who is singing in the opera house.
What I found most compelling—and I did find the story quite compelling this time around—was the way that Joyce begins with a very wide angle view of the evening and ends with a very tight one, inside Gabriel’s mind, feeling his feelings. This interiority begins at the dinner party, when he dances with a friend and finds himself uncomfortably confronted about his political views. It continues when he gives his toast, emboldened when the party responds well, carefully altering his intonation to achieve the tone he desires. His head is the only one we really get inside, but we are in and out of it, which serves as a reminder that there are other heads we could be in.
Once the party ends though, and Gabriel is on his way home with his wife, we are immersed in his thoughts—a condition all the more striking because they are written with such care and mastery by Joyce. Gabriel is seized by lust and love for his wife—looking at her back as she walks ahead of him, he longs to be alone with her. He experiences a full lifetime of rapturous memories with her and he falls in love with her all over again in his mind.
It is once they get back to their hotel room, once he is standing there feeling that he will die if she doesn’t turn to look at him, or say his name, or yield to him in any small way—it is then that with him, the reader remembers that there are other heads we could be in—namely her head. You see, something very different has been going on in her head. The dead are alive in there, resurrected by a few notes on the piano. I shall say nothing more, but there’s the crux of it—the battle between the living and the dead!
Excuse the Amazon link. Ew.
Of Mice and Men is a favourite of mine! and I know I've read the Dead, but it failed to make an impression at the time. This has inspired me to give it another go.
I was waiting for a post exactly like this.