Inverno

(by Cynthia Zarin)

I wanted to love this book because I’ve loved Cynthia Zarin’s nonfiction, but this was a slow read for me and I didn’t find it quite as compelling as I wanted to. That said, I didn’t hate it, and it might be a good book for me to reread in winter, when the outside world matches the space of the book better. Because, as the title tells us, this is a (mostly) wintry book, with lots of imagery of snow and ice, and repeated references to The Snow Queen. At one point in this book, “the story of the Snow Queen” is described as “a tale in which the ending takes a long time to happen, as if it were a story unfolding inside a story, an origami snowflake that holds another snowflake, until it retreats into a shard of salt,” which is, (perhaps not surprisingly), a decent description of this book as well. This book repeats itself, repeats images and sentences and themes; at one point children are described as not yet knowing “that the stories that are repeated are the important ones, that the point of the story is that it is repeated, that inside the story is a fairytale.” Which, again, describes this book.

In terms of plot, there isn’t much of it: a woman, Caroline, waits in the snow in Central Park for a man, Alastair, to call her. But that’s the story inside the story: there’s also a narrator talking to someone else—a woman talking to a man. The man and the woman, like Caroline and Alastair, are or were lovers; time is shifty in this book. (Caroline and Alastair have known each other for decades; we get memories and moments from throughout their relationship at various points in the novel.) Thematically the book explores love, and love lost, and deception, and connection, and lack thereof. The telephone is an almost talismanic object in the narrative; we get long descriptions of what it was like to talk on the phone before cell phones and cordless phones and answering machines, when there were many working phone booths on city street corners and “if someone called and you picked up, they knew where you were.”

The narrative is very associative, which works for me; Caroline thinks about how “each snarled thread leads to something else, many other things, too many” and talks about liking Oblique Strategies. There are references to Caroline’s childhood memories (playing board games, briefly being a Brownie) and to songs (often about telephones) and to films (a lot of which I haven’t seen, so I think those references were somewhat lost on me). And the writing is often really beautiful, like, for example, this: “Along any road in the country the telephone poles stretched for miles, timber poles with wires looping over them, a chain stitch across the map.” Or this: “The fireflies in a dome above the field, fixed as constellations, a ring around the rose, circling the earth.” Or this: “The lights, like snow globes, illuminated the falling sharp-edged snowflakes, snow like stars, a Pleiades of snow.” At one point Caroline writing to Alastair is described as “a ghost writing to a ghost,” and I like that a lot—how when Caroline writes to this person with whom she was romantically involved when they were both young, their present selves dissolve, even as their past selves remain out of reach.