The Silence of Falling Snow

A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more

The Silence of Falling Snow

From an innovator of autofiction comes a meditation on grief, care, Buddhism, and artmaking.

‘This is a story. It is a story about someone accompanying another to the last gate.’

Years ago, Kristjana Gunnars took her husband back to his home in Oslo to die. Through the dark, cold days, she tends to his needs as she feels her own self disintegrating. Later, as she looks back to this slow departure of the man she loved, she weaves together threads from her own life, reflections on the thoughts of Gautama Buddha, discussions of Renaissance art, and considerations of contemporary artists.

Engaging with thinkers as varied as Ingmar Bergman and Jacques Derrida, Henry David Thoreau, and Ursula K. Le Guin, Gunnars — one of the earliest practitioners of “autofiction” — crafts a new kind of hybrid text, with elements of memoir, lyrical essay, Buddhist teachings, poetics, art theory, and meditation.

The Silence of Falling Snow is a deep dive into grief, the way we circle around it, dipping in and out of the pain, finding comfort in art and philosophy and religion where we can. It’s an intellectual cabaret, a Buddhist primer, and a pointillist portrait of grief – above all, it’s the consoling and invigorating reflection we need in this moment.

AUTHOR

Kristjana Gunnars

Kristjana Gunnars is a writer and painter, author of several books of various genres, and she frequently exhibits her artwork in Canada. She has participated in Buddhist groups and retreats with Tibetan teachers in years past. She lives in British Columbia, Canada. She is currently Visiting Professor in Languages and Literature at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik.

Reviews

Gunnars shines in her ability to offer taxonomies of experience especially mourning and loneliness She is an articulate explorer of compassion and the strange lands occasioned through sudden loss Jarett Myskiw The Winnipeg Free Press

What do we know about what we dont know What are we willing to notknow about what we think we know Kristjana Gunnars has always been a writer willing to write in between and through genres to find her way into the bewildering space of true inquiry She invokes Agambens description of that shocked gaze in figures of murals from Pompeii as a figure for the writer confronting the literally unspeakable human experience of the profoundest grief Using a range of touchstones including films literature painting sculpture theology philosophy the history of the city of Oslo and the ancient Pali canon of Buddhist teachings as well as a searing interrogation of trauma and tragedy in her own life Gunnars confronts interrogates and illuminates the excruciating relational networks between grief and the creative life Kazim Ali author of Indian Winter

In her quietly powerful antimemoir Kristjana Gunnars refuses to give a description of feelings and events She sets out to write a book of snow and succeeds Martha Baillie author of There is No Blue

Praise for The Scent of Light

These novels are meant to be experienced not just in language but in their rhythms in their interruptions and silences in their structures and patterns and shapes of thought These books do not merely depict life nor tell about lives lived by characters outside the writer or the reader They are themselves alive And in them a reader comes to life Kazim Ali from the introduction

Gunnars questions what writing accomplishes when memory and emotions are fleeting in her sophisticated omnibus of autofiction and literary criticism Publishers Weekly

I was smitten with the simple lyrical ruminations on Kierkegaard and Cixous being a fickle unfaithful reader window shutters and obituaries all against a backdrop of heated arguments with her lover Marcie McCauley Chicago Review of Books

Kristjana Gunnarss The Scent of Light is a work unyielding in its sensuality uniquely attuned to the slippery nature of reading in the Information Age Dashiel Carrera Rain Taxi Review of Books