The Only Snow in Havana

by Elizabeth Hay

In one of the earliest works by the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner, Elizabeth Hay collects a series of reflections on life, identity, history, and love, drifting through her many homes — Yellowknife, Mexico City, Toronto, and New York City — to consider Canadian identity. Hay reflects on the idea of being Canadian — what it means, who we are, how do we act, how do we live — and compares it to the world around her in stunning detail, drawing the disparate locations together by their connection to the history of the early Canadian fur trade and our hearty adoration of snow. She writes of the heart of a country, the history of a people that live on the brink of identity. Blending memoir, biography, and history in a provocative intensity, Hay’s style and talent shines through in this early work, proving her well on the road to her long and lustrous career.

Genres: Nonfiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

From Elizabeth Hay's web site:
"Elizabeth Hay was born in Owen Sound, Ontario, the daughter of a high school principal and a painter, and one of four children. When she was fifteen, a year in England opened up her world and set her on the path to becoming a writer. She attended the University of Toronto, then moved out west, and in 1974 went north to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. For the next ten years she worked as a CBC radio broadcaster in Yellowknife, Winnipeg, and Toronto, and eventually freelanced from Mexico. In 1986 she moved from Mexico to New York City, and in 1992, with her husband and two children, she returned to Canada, settling in Ottawa, where she has lived ever since.

In 2007 Elizabeth Hay's third novel, Late Nights on Air, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her first novel was A Student of Weather (2000), a finalist for the Giller Prize, the Ottawa Book Award, and the Pearson Canada Reader's Choice Award at The Word on the Street, and winner of the CAA MOSAID Technologies Inc. Award for Fiction and the TORGI Award. Her second novel, Garbo Laughs (2003), won the Ottawa Book Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award. Hay is also the author of Crossing the Snow Line (stories, 1989); The Only Snow in Havana (non-fiction, 1992), which was a co-winner of the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-fiction; Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (non-fiction, 1993), and Small Change (stories, 1997), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Book Award, and the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Hay received the Marian Engel Award for her body of work in 2002."

Reviews

[Paula Dembeck · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is a great puzzle to me.

I have read Hay’s other later work (“A Student of Weather”, “Light Nights on Air” and “Alone in the Classroom”) all of which were excellent. This is a much earlier work (first published in 1992), which I admit I did not get at all or even like.

It seems to be a combination of a number of disparate things: a personal memoir, a book about travel, a longing for Canada, various historical fragments on the explorers and natives of Canada, observations about fur, stories about the fur trade and musings on snow. The question for me is, what ties all these things together? Unable to decipher the answer to that problem, I am lost.

The book chronicles an 18 year period in which Hay traveled far and wide to Latin American, the Canadian North, Britain and the United States. She has left her husband and is nurturing a new love. There are fragments of stories interspersed with observations about family, friends and places she has lived and visited. I was determined to finish the book and I did. But it didn’t really hang together in any significant way for me.

I have obviously missed something.

It did win the 1993 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non Fiction.

[Megan]

While some parts on Canadian identity and race felt a bit dated I really enjoyed the writing, and thinking about cold, snow and being an outsider

[Margaret Joyce · Rating 3 out of 5]

This rather impressionistic,rambling book by Hay is lovely in its own way, but I had to stop before the end as its premise - frustrating and somewhat vague, was, I had to admit, just out of my reach. It was the perfect book - for someone else.

[Joyce · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoy all of Elizabeth Hay's books, especially, A STudent of Weather. this is a small book about a trip to Cuba and a writer's comparative impressions with the north.