I slide forward and fall onto my ribs, the birdcage of the soul is hit, its bars absorb the blow, movement and balance have not yet been assimilated into the body. But he remembers the shock of pain clearly. I think I hear my brother laughing, "I told you so." From the ground level, the snowy cliffs topped with virginia echo the assertion that the sites of the Alps look the same, and what clears the head so much, the real world is spread out entirely in the library, in what people struggle to think, and not in speed, strength, coordination. This is the amount that has come down to us by inheritance, my brother and I balance ourselves, he opens up to the world, I close myself off from it.

How to define Still Snow Even in a Storm ? A minor autobiography? A fictional memoir?

This is ostensibly a series of stories that follows its single protagonist chronologically: from a small boy watching his sister's engagement, through a boy preparing for his Bar Mitzvah, and a soldier who climbs onto a truck on the battlefield, to a man working in a hospital and dealing with his parents' old age. But the book resists this move and moves wildly and tensely between the empty and unnarrated spaces of time, and between the fictional, the autobiographical, the realistic, the grotesque, the real, and the lyrical. The narrator's life expands and takes shape, as do his relationships with his friends, his family, and his various loves. And it seems that precisely from the similarities and the abysmal differences between him and his subjects, from the changing distances of observation - including emotional ones - that exist in his stories, and from the leaps - a delicate thread, both conscious and plot, is slowly woven, and the narrator's identity and voice are powerfully crystallized through it.