Snow at 5 PM

by Jee Leong Koh

The rescue of a literary manuscript results in a war of words over the interpretation of 107 haiku about New York’s Central Park. In the battle of commentaries, what is at stake is nothing less than the meaning of America in an imaginary but highly plausible future. Reenvisioning Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire for a technologized age, Snow at 5 PM discovers revolutionary uses, and abuses, for literature and history.

Genres: Fiction, Poetry

402 pages, Paperback

Published September 10, 2020

About the author

Jee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the Year by UK's Financial Times and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the USA. His hybrid work of fiction, Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an insignificant Japanese poet, won the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize in English fiction. He was also shortlisted for the prize for The Pillow Book (Math Paper Press/Awai Books) and Connor and Seal (Sibling Rivalry). His second Carcanet book, Inspector Inspector, was published in late 2022.

Koh's work has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Malay, Vietnamese, Russian, and Latvian. Originally from Singapore, Koh lives in New York City, where he heads the literary non-profit Singapore Unbound, the indie press Gaudy Boy, and the journal of Asian writing and art SUSPECT.

Reviews

[Andrew H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Snow at 5pm is to the C21 what The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy was to the C18. In true Sternian fashion, Snow at 5pm absorbs other sources, relishes in digressions, and takes as its main theme: the problems of language, in particular, the problem of translation. We assume that the best translation is the translation that draws closest to the original. But is that ever really possible? There is an assumption, and it is a dangerous one, that the translator knows the author's'mind (as it were) and the translation is a recovery of that authorial intention. Post-structuralism through a massive spanner into those works by insisting that the author is dead and there is no author to recover consequently. No hand moves behind the words. The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy is a sublime joke at the expense of the omniscient narrator. Tristram knows everything and a knowall is an unreliable narrator. Shandy Hall exists amidst a mad world and at the novel's heart there exists a satire on the world of politics. That is also true of Snow at 5pm which projects its concerns beyond Trump into a dystopian world gone mad.

Snow at 5pm is not an easy read: it crosses many genres and this has the effect of wrong footing the reader. What exactly is the reader reading? Well, in part, the reader is reading poetry, 107 haiku. But then, each haiku is analysed on a parallel page. So this is a work of literary criticism. But what kind of criticism? Koh, as a teacher of this discipline, knows what a fraught discipline this is. As with translation, literary criticism, historically, has been bound up with the author, finding the voice behind the words, the authorial viewpoint. Modern criticism has become more concerned with finding the reader. There is a middle way, though, as this work observes: "a poem is the creation of author and reader." A wild Wildean belief that treads a path between epireading and graphireading. Texts are revelations of the reader. Welcome to the glass bead game of interpretation... In Snow at 5pm readers are led in both directions, into an analysis of the game before them, into the life of the critic, Sam Fujimoto-Mayer. In this sense, the fictionist work spins off into biography -- but a biography to tantalise the biographer. SFM, who loves Hermes Brown, is as hermeneutically complex as Woolf's Orlando.

I can only imagine Snow at 5pm as a set of Matryroshka nesting dolls. The work starts with a simple narrative thread. Jee Leong Koh, poet, discovers a bundle of haiku. And translates them from Japanese into English, The originals are lost. SFM, in a feat of memory, as explained in his Preface, sets about analysing and synthesising the haiku as revealed by Jee Leong Koh. There are errors, however, in SFM's memory, as Sulaiman notes in her Postface. And SFM's criticism varies wildly. The Confucian unwobbling pivot is off its axis. Real authors and fictional authors mix in a melee of confusion and disagreement.

Snow at 5pm holds a spectrum of concerns -- a deeply knowledgeable history of haiku, a psychogeography of Central Park, a study of human alienation, all told through prose that is intellectual, humorous, poetical, satirical, quixotic, and as filthy as Sterne or Rabelais.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mediation on desire, loss and identity, this dystopian metafiction is a tour de force! No, it's not a page turner in the traditional sense, but with each haiku and commentary the reader is plunged into not one, but countless disperse worlds and points of view. In this biography of poet/revolutionary Sam Fujumoto-Mayer and Koh himself, we see history (actual and fictional) blended to create a very engrossing read. Full of wit and humor. Through these pages we not only discover the intricacies of translating haiku, but how we struggle to translate and traverse our histories, both individually and collectively.

I came away with a similar feeling I had after reading "Austerlitz," by W.G. Sebald: I was so engrossed in the characters and the story that I had forgotten at times I was reading fiction and was upset that it was fiction. Bravo Jee!

[Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a masterpiece. And I say that despite its obvious indebtedness to Pale Fire, and despite my general distaste for dystopias. It's terrifically hard to categorize this book. Sam Fujimoto-Mayer, the main narrative voice, may be writing his commentary in the year 2066, and some of this commentary does refer to events in Koh's dystopian future USA, but much more of it refers to our past, with tales of John Cage and Isamu Noguchi interspersed throughout. Somehow this is exactly, apparently, how I like my narratives to work, threaded through interpretations of haiku that might as well be considered factual, if it weren't for the fact that I have no evidence that Koh composed his 107 Central Park haiku before he composed Fujimoto-Mayer's commentary on them.

I also find it delicious how this book plays with the dividing line between reality and fiction. Fujimoto-Mayer credits Jee Leong Koh as merely the translator of the sequence of haiku; the template of Kenneth Rexroth's Marichiko is explicitly referred to in the commentary. Snow at 5 PM wears its influences on its sleeve, and is none the worse for it.

[Amelia Storck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Snow at 5 PM is a brilliantly inventive and intellectually rich novel that blurs the boundaries between fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. At its heart is a high-stakes battle over the interpretation of 107 haiku centered on New York’s Central Park, a conflict that unfolds as a meditation on literature, history, and the very meaning of America in a near-future, technologized world.

Koh’s work is ambitious and multilayered, reimagining the experimental narrative strategies of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire while forging a unique voice for our contemporary moment. The narrative interweaves literary analysis, commentary, and storytelling in a way that challenges readers to think critically about authorship, interpretation, and the ways in which texts shape cultural memory.

The characters, caught in a war of words over these haiku, illuminate how literature can wield power not just aesthetically, but politically and culturally. Koh’s prose is sharp, precise, and often lyrical, with each page demanding attention while rewarding it with wit, insight, and philosophical depth.

Snow at 5 PM will appeal to readers of experimental fiction, literary puzzles, and poetry-driven narratives. It’s a story for those who love to engage with text on multiple levels, blending intellectual rigor with narrative ingenuity and a profound exploration of culture, identity, and interpretation.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems preceding each chapter - haiku - slivered images - are beautiful; whispers; silks teasing us through the novel as through a maze. And sometimes the prose which follows is a delight. "The haiku wrong-foots the reader every step of the way." Koh is a wonderful poet and I would expect nothing but grand poetry from him. The premise of the book - synthetic analyses of a sometimes synthetic history, ala Nabokov's Pnin. Those parts, the lion's share of the lion's share of the novel are promising but however graceful and fine a poet Jee Leong Koh is in his own right, I wasn't always enamored of his narrative skill. Yes, he certainly has more than enough intellectual background. He has deep shelves, if you will. One example - and I may want to reconsider but...the narrative about Naguchi after WWII, the Japanese emulation of American ways was bulky and hard to follow. Snow at 5 PM is an impressive project with many delights -no doubt there. Jee Leong Koh is a friend of mine - of twenty or so years.

[amber :) · Rating 4 out of 5]

wow.. this book was unlike anything i’ve ever read before and it was literally quite out of this world i don’t even know how to properly describe it

a lot of the historical and literary references in sam’s commentaries were new knowledge to me so i couldn’t follow everything smoothly (especially with the blurring of reality and fiction too) but i think that’s one of the great things about this book! and the author did such an amazing job exploring the issues of translation and memory wow

i definitely want to revisit this again in the future!!

[Maria F Brandt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This is a book to sit with. To enter. To read out loud. Nonlinear and transgressive. Genre-bending. Heart-bending….