Canadian Writers Abroad

Review of The Silence of Falling Snow by Kristjana Gunnars. Coach House Books, Toronto, 2025. Trade paperback, 238 pages.
Reviewed by Mary Fowke.

There are times when a reader wishes for a book that is a gentle companion and wise guide, one that engenders deep reflections and the contemplation of life and death. Times especially of loss or of death itself. The Silence of Falling Snow by the Icelandic-Canadian writer and artist Kristjana Gunnars is such a book. Written in the aftermath of her husband’s death, it is based around the three month period following his terminal cancer diagnosis, when they returned from British Columbia to Oslo in his native Norway, “when one of us was declining and preparing to depart, and the other of us was in a waiting space that was full and empty at the same time.”

While The Silence of Falling Snow can be considered a memoir about grief, its scope is broader than the usual parameters of the genre. For one thing, it is unusually replete with citations from a vast range of writers, artists, and thinkers, spanning centuries and continents. These include European philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Rancière, the Americans Henry Thoreau and Walt Whitman, and contemporary thinkers Donna Haraway and Gabor Maté, as well as numerous Asian and Scandinavian artists. But most of all, it is infused with Buddhist thought, and especially that stemming from the ancient Pali Canon. It radiates wisdom.

The Silence of Falling Snow’s capaciousness, and moreover the frequently metaphysical nature of the many quotes, reflect the American writer Ursula Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” which Gunnars summarizes, explaining: “a work of literature can be a collection of things that has the function of a medicine bundle… A story can be a collection of healing words.” Gunnars goes on to quote the literary critic Jonathan Culler who says that a story can also be an attempt at “confronting an endless series of memories that cannot be integrated.” This is not a memoir of resolution or restitution, of “closure”; Gunnars references a feeling of estrangement that would stay with her for years. It is instead a book of, as Gunnars says herself, musings and remembrances, the three month period it covers providing its primary structure.

Within the fragmentary, collective, nature of The Silence of Falling Snow, with its multitudinous voices, the author’s voice is, in a sense, but one. This genre-defying quality of the book is not atypical of Gunnars’ writing. The five novellas that comprise her 2022 collection The Scent of Light (works formerly published individually between 1998 and 2008 by Red Deer Press, then brought together in a new edition by Coach House Books), for instance, merge literary criticism and memoir (The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust) and span genres ranging from thriller (The Prowler) to non-fiction (Zero Hour). Gunnars has also published numerous volumes of poetry.

The ever changing self is a feature of Gunnars’ work and, reflecting on such change, she writes in the The Silence of Falling Snow that “Maybe this so-called ‘self’ is a universe of orbiting stars.” In a passage that echoes the book’s title, she muses that “Talking about the ‘self’ is like talking about something invisible. This is how you can walk on snow without leaving a trail.” There is an ephemerality too in the representation of her husband during the three month period leading up to his death: he is unnamed, referred to almost always as he. This starkness is perhaps a reminder that he could be any of us, and of how pain and heartbreak are not, as Gunnars points out, the exception but the rule.

The Silence of Falling Snow is an understandably sombre book but also one that invokes the beauty of nature and life. It is filled with references to birds, trees, the sky, the stars, light, and, of course, snow. On a typographical level, breaks between sections are marked by a snowflake design. Back in Canada after her husband’s death, Gunnars writes that the three graces: joy, beauty, and creativity, are always there like the backdrop of the mountains where she lives.

Structured in twenty-five parts but taken as a whole, The Silence of Falling Snow can be viewed as a meditation on life and death. It is a book to be read more for its holding of space than for the narrative of a terminal illness itself and, although it is the kind of work you can pick up randomly and dip into, it deserves to be read as an incremental understanding and coming to terms with death whereby the reader is accompanying the author on her journey. This is a role I can imagine only a particular type of reader would want to take on. As there is no doubt from the book’s outset that the period from diagnosis to death is three months, The Silence of Falling Snow is not a book to be read for narrative but for something more akin to a quality of existential being.

Partner and caregiver, Gunnars’ sensibility is deeply thoughtful and contemplative. She writes that her project during the three month period was to take care, but explains too that caregivers also need to take care of themselves, and that her way was through walking, painting, and jewellery making. These soothing activities woven into the everyday give a sense of her physical experience during the solemn period while her husband is mostly bedridden, but it is primarily the world of delicate thought and attentiveness that suffuses the book. For someone who is going through a similar time of loss and grief, her words, and those of the many other wise guides she invokes, can be a consolation, and helpful in transcending that which can be hard to bear.

On New Year’s Eve, we pulled two chairs to the window and watched
the fireworks over the city of Oslo. Lights from the lampposts and from
windows of the buildings along the street lit up the white snow. The sky
had been Persian blue earlier, a special hue I hardly ever saw. Establishments
where people went to eat and drink were open and lit up, and yet
the streets were strangely empty. The green benches along the sidewalks
that stood up from the snowbanks were themselves covered with more
snow. There were no cars in the street either.
The world was white and strangely silent. I remembered it was the
Russian painter Vassily Kandinsky who once said that white is the colour
of silence.
–Kristjana Gunnars, The Silence of Falling Snow ( pdf text pages 30 -31).

Born in Iceland, Kristjana Gunnars has lived there and in Norway, off and on throughout. In Iceland, she worked as a teacher and a journalist, most recently as a visiting professor at the Department of Languages and Culture, University of Iceland, Reykjavik (2020-2025). In Norway, when not spending time with her husband, she was a guest teacher at the University of Oslo, on an ad hoc basis. In 1997, she was a visiting scholar at the Institute for British and American Studies, University of Oslo, Blindern, Norway. Before that, she was a visiting professor in the Department of English, University of Trier, Germany (May-June, 1992). Living in Canada since 1969, Gunnars taught at the University of Alberta in Edmonton (1990-2005).
Poetry publications by Kristjana Gunnars include snake charmers: a cycle of twenty poems (above/ground press, Ottawa, 2026), Ruins of the Heart, a collection of six long poems (Angelico Press, New York, 2022), and At Home in the Mountains, a chapbook of 20 poems (Junction Press, Toronto, 2019). Fiction includes the novellas of The Scent of Light (Coach House Books, 2022), and the short stories collected in Any Day But This (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2004).

Born and raised in Canada, Mary Fowke has been living in Lisbon for over twenty-five years, where she works as a psychotherapist. She recently completed a PhD at the University of Lisbon’s Department of English and American Studies where she is a researcher and co-editor of ROAM Creative Journal. Her thesis investigated relationships with homes of origin in memoirs by three Canadian immigrant writers. For the past several years she has also been working on a novel.

Further

• Kristjana Gunnars has two websites: pre-2015 and 2015-present. The first is more fulsome in its bibliographic, biographical, and academic information.
• Even more thorough is the entry for Kristjana Gunnars in “Canadian Writers” by Athabasca University.
• Gunnars on Asemic Art (August 2024).
• Gunnars at Coach House Books.
• Review by Kathie Kolybaba of three collections of poetry by Gunnars (Settlement Poems I and II, and Wake-Pick Poems), in Bordercrossings (1982).
• A modern take on Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, The Yale Review.
• ROAM – Representatives of Home Creative Journal.
  
  Header photo of flying over snow in Saskatchewan taken by Jose Manuel Quintas.