Fiction This article is more than 10 years oldReviewButterflies in November by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir – review
This article is more than 10 years oldSarah Moss takes a whimsical Icelandic journeyThe unnamed narrator of Butterflies in November is a translator between Icelandic and "11 other languages", a woman who regards words, writing and fiction with suspicion as well as love, and argues with her husband by "regurgitating an entire paragraph from a manuscript I once proofread". An epilogue containing "47 cooking recipes and one knitting recipe" begins by reminding the reader that "No words can be categorical enough to exclude any possibility of misinterpretation." So this is a playfully self-conscious novel, reflecting on the relationships between reading and experience in a manner that is initially beguiling but palls with repetition.
The story opens in Reykjavik, where the narrator's marriage is collapsing, partly as a result of her dippy-but-charming habits. "It's as if you just didn't want to grow up," says her husband, "doing your weird and careless things." She visits a fortune-teller, sleeps with a couple of men, moves out of the marital home into a studio flat on the harbour, and finds herself landed with a friend's four-year-old son for a weekend that turns into the whole winter. The child, who is deaf and has a speech impediment which prompts more musings on language and communication chooses the numbers for a lottery ticket that turns the narrator into one of the richest people in Iceland. The woman and the boy set off around the Ring Road on an out-of-season journey of discovery and reparation. Meanwhile, butterflies, often visible only to the narrator, appear and disappear in unnatural seasons and places.
There are likable aspects to this novel. It is cheering to see an emerging strain of feminine picaresque in Icelandic fiction in translation (Gðrún Eva Mínervudóttir's The Creator being another example) – a welcome change from the murder mysteries that usually make it across the North Atlantic. There are moving moments of sadness and hilarity, especially during the flashbacks to the narrator's own childhood and adolescence, and Ólafsdóttir shows a rare ability to write a serious and convincing small child; the boy's flowering relationship with his clueless foster-carer is beautifully handled. The author's delight in the strangeness of Iceland's weather and landscape will appeal to many readers.
Nevertheless, there are oddities that non-Icelandic readers will find problematic. A nursery worker includes "a child with a Senegalese father" in a list of children with disabilities, a view that goes unquestioned by the narrator. "Foreigners" appear repeatedly as a subspecies, whether lost in central Reykjavik, working on a highland dam, or cooking and eating protected snow buntings. The same kinds of generalisation apply to gender. "It is no small feat for a woman to have to stick to the right-hand side of the road; that's where reason reigns, not the heart." This isn't a feminist novel.
For writing so explicitly concerned with the powers and nuances of words, Brian FitzGibbon's translation is badly scarred by clumsiness of grammar, syntax and expression. Perhaps the original Icelandic is as sloppy; it's not as if the narrator were characterised by intellectual rigour. Butterflies in November has done well in French and will find readers who like kooky narrators, gender essentialism and recipes in novels. If you don't, steer clear. And that knitting "recipe" makes no sense at all.
Sarah Moss's Names for the Sea is published by Granta.
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