Title: Encyclopaedia of Snow Author: Sarah Emily Miano Publisher: Picador The Encyclopaedia of Snow is one of 2003's true mysteries and quite possibly the best US debut work. It's also incredibly complicated, not least by the assumed fiction that its author, Sarah Emily Miano, disappeared, the bound Encyclopaedia manuscript found in her snowed-in car left behind. And as we open the book we discover Miano may not be the only compiler, a Swiss alchemist turning up in the book's pages as character in the text's compilation and book-ending character of his own tale. Confused? Hell yes. Complex? You bet your Ezra Pound for Pound it is. Brilliant? I think so, but it's taken me six months to review so I'm still a little hesitant. On a formal level, the Encyclopaedia is an encyclopaedia of terms, not all necessarily related to snow, ice or the cold. For each term there is an entry, composed of perhaps a description, a quote, a poem, a novella or a scene from a play. The term may be linked to a footnote, which may be a quote that has little to do, narrative-wise, with the text but everything to do with it laterally. At the end of each entry is the author, who may or may not be the author of the entry, and may be "real" (i.e. T S Eliot, a bank clerk with "odd jobs later in life") or a fictional blurring (e.g. Jean Rimbaud, born and dying at the same time as Arthur but serving as an interpreter for a Swiss circus). And a bizarre adolescent moment is listed under Miano who also, (by now of course) appears as an entry. As does the editor, in this case "Anon." These details are found in the Notes, which conclude the main text, but not the text of the Encyclopaedia, after which we find an epilogue of conversations, a love and a life fragmented into pocket-bites of prosical magic and loss. The Encyclopaedia is not a book of answers, but more a combination of alchemical narratives and caustic snapshots, small-town life summed up in a tale of incest, anorexic bulimia and impotence in the entry for Frigid - "There were two kinds of guys in Buffalo: those who digged cars and those who didn't. Those who didn't dig cars had a fetish for sports." With good reason the high school narrator falls for an unsatisfactory oaf who likes Jacky Chan flicks. In other tale a young girl experiences the Lynchian darkness that dwells in every suburban cookie-baking house and the disassociation many of us learn to deal with the pain that remains. Writ large across (or is that through?) the Encyclopaedia is the influence of the famous Modernists Pound and Eliot, yet the playfulness of the postmodernists shines through; the text may be dense and referential, but not deliberately obscure or elliptic. In here, like all encyclopaedias, are many narratives, many authors inside their own texts, inside their own stories and histories, and language passes through it all, as does our yearning for completion, and for emptiness and sometimes for absolution. Miano's book will haunt and posses, much like Mark Danielewzki's House of Leaves, and you will walk away confused and astounded. But in a world of Harry Potter-esque predictability/senility, a book that can reach and speak to our darker and our deeper selves is something to be held and cherished for as long as we're allowed.