In Mind of Winter, Holly – one-time MFA graduate and aspiring poet, now doting mother – wakes one snowy winter morning in her home in the Detroit suburbs with a disquieting phrase running through her head: "Something had followed them home from Russia."
Thirteen years ago, she and her husband Eric travelled to Siberia to adopt their now 15-year-old daughter Tatiana from the Pokrovka Orphanage #2, a grim, understaffed edifice full of abandoned and unwanted children, amongst whom they’d found their beloved Tatty, just like a beautiful Russian princess straight out of a snow-covered fairy tale: a “Jet-Black Rapunzel”, with her “enormous dark eyes” floating amid her flawless complexion, “the color of milk stained with a drop of blue food coloring”.
With the ominous phrase running through her head, Holly feels an urge to put pen to paper for the first time in years, if only in an attempt to crystallise the threat she feels hanging in the air around her, but today is Christmas Day and there’s already enough to do in terms of preparing the customary feast for their many guests, not to mention the fact that she and Eric have overslept. He immediately starts for the airport, realising that the plane bringing his parents from Newark will already have arrived, leaving Holly at home alone with Tatty.
The snowfall quickly turns into a blizzard and Holly and Tatty are trapped in the house, cut off from everyone else in something of a metaphor for what can only be described as the biological untethering that unmoors each of them: Holly’s “family fate is over” (in her mid-20s she had a preventative hysterectomy and double mastectomy in anticipation of the cancer that killed her mother and drove her sister to suicide), and Tatty entered their lives “without a legacy … so beautiful and perfect she did not need one”.
All, however, is not as idyllic as it seems. One by one, Holly’s guests call to say they’re snowed in and can’t make the celebrations, then Eric rings with the news that his mother is unwell and he’s had to divert to the hospital. Holly puts her original plans on hold and tries to look on the bright side, preparing for a day of uninterrupted mother-daughter festive bonding, but as the day progresses, she finds herself struggling to make sense of her daughter’s uncharacteristically erratic and moody behaviour. Tatty is distant and upset, keeps changing her clothes without reason, and taking herself off for long naps. Something is seriously wrong.
Kasischke’s prose cleverly enacts the claustrophobia of the situation through repetition and somewhat rambling sidelines as Holly becomes more and more confused by the strange turn of the day’s events; every minute detail taking on potential significance that bears paragraphs of picking apart. There’s a clear attempt here towards the poetic; unfortunately though, it doesn’t quite work. Instead these asides do read as a highly convincing account of an increasingly paranoid mind, but this doesn’t detract from the fact that they actually make for equally increasingly frustrating reading. The sense of foreboding grows but then the reader’s kept on tenterhooks waiting for the denouement just that little bit too long, suggesting that the tale might have worked better as a short story; condensed, compressed, and thus, ultimately, packing more of a punch.
That said, the sluggish scenes set in the present are offset against a much more sharply realised past, particularly Holly’s memories of her and Eric’s time in Siberia prior to the finalisation of Tatty’s adoption; most poignantly the Christmas Day on which they first met their daughter-to-be.
The title of the novel comes from the opening stanza of Wallace Steven's poem The Snow Man. "For the listener, who listens in the snow,/And, nothing himself, beholds/Nothing this is not there and the nothing that is", the poem concludes, suggesting a fine line between reality and the imagination. It's an intriguing choice of title, obviously apt given both Kasischke's own work as a poet and the fact that Holly is a one-time wordsmith suffering from more than a decade of writer's block, but the full resonance of the line only comes into focus as Kasischke's unsettling psychological chiller draws to its unnerving close. "It isn't repression to acknowledge the horrors of this world and let them go," Holly thinks. "It's freedom." But, as Holly learns by the end of the day, this freedom comes at a high price.
Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.