Butterflies in November
Audur Ava Olafsdottir
Black Cat
2004
Translated from the Icelandic by Brian Fitzgibbon 2013
Ms. Hen decided to read this novel because she liked the
title, and it’s Icelandic. Ms. Hen is on a reading binge on books from Iceland,
in order to prepare for her trip.
Ms. Hen thinks this is the perfect novel to get someone
excited about traveling to Iceland. The narrator is a quirky character: it’s
as if she’s a literary version of the singer Bjork. Ms. Hen envisions that
everyone in Iceland is as eccentric as Bjork, but she won’t know until she gets
there. She’s not scared, but she doesn’t know what to expect. Ms. Hen is a
strange hen, but she attempts to appear as a normal hen to people who don’t
know her.
This novel is about a woman who gets dumped by her lover and
her husband on the same day, for the same reason. She is a translator of eleven
languages. The men say she is distant, and they do not understand her. She has
no yearnings towards motherhood, and makes impulsive decisions about things.
Her friend, a single mother, Audur, asks the narrator take care of her four-year-old deaf-mute son
while she is in the hospital pregnant with complications from having twins.
Audur sends the narrator to a psychic since she could not go herself, and the psychic confuses but inspires the narrator.
She wins the lottery and sets off on an adventure around the
Ring Road in Iceland, the road that circles the island. She runs into an
Estonian choir, several animals die on the way, and she meets three mysterious
men. The boy is quiet for a child, which the narrator enjoys because they can
handle each other’s company.
Ms. Hen noticed that this is a sensory novel. There are
a lot of smells described in the text, and also many descriptions of food and
eating. The end of the novel is a list of recipes of food that appeared in the
book, mostly Icelandic food, including sour whale, stuffed goose, and pepper
cookies.
Lots of chickens and hens appeared in this novel.
Interspersed between the narrative are bits of fantasy and memories that the narrator
has. She is eating dinner with the fisherman boyfriend of her dreams, “…but then
one day, after three months, as
we’re eating chicken with coconut milk with corn, beans, and rice, because he’d
rather not have fish, he says between mouthfuls, ‘Feels a bit empty around
here, have you changed anything?’” When her husband is about to leave, he leaves clues around the house, “And then there were the homemade crossword puzzles
left by the phone, love, nine down, longing, six across, coward, seven down.
Affection, desire, and chicken.”
Ms. Hen thinks this novel is zany and quirky. She loved the
descriptions of people’s lives in Iceland. This novel is quite different from
INDEPENDENT PEOPLE, the previous book she read about Iceland. It’s a modern
fable, about a woman in today’s Iceland, and unlike most women, doesn’t pay
attention to what the world thinks of her; she does
her own thing, and has her own vision, and that is a lesson that Ms. Hen
learned from reading BUTTERFLIES IN NOVEMBER. She learned she should be herself – and she
shouldn’t let other people bother her, because in the end, it doesn’t matter
what anyone else thinks, life only boils down to the choice to be happy J
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