An unnamed woman embarks on a wintry road trip with a deaf-mute child and a 'pet butterfly' in this evocative novel
Road trips in novels such as On the Road are a narrative device capturing the dream of leaving behind an old life and finding fresh adventures. It is the wintry roads of Iceland – and the metaphorical paths taken and not taken – that twist and turn throughout this evocative, humorous novel, beautifully translated from Icelandic by Brian FitzGibbon. The narrative begins in the dark days of November when "nothing is as it should be" in the unnamed narrator's life.
"On the threshold of a new life, it is important to shed all the things you don't need," she acknowledges, but although she sheds her husband and home, she gains unexpected companions – her friend's four-year-old, deaf-mute son, Tumi, who is cast into her care, and a "pet butterfly". A sudden change of fortune brings them a lottery win with which to embark on a road trip, but money can't buy love, and leaving behind a life raises questions that have long haunted her: "Who would miss me if I never resurface again?"
It's the humans here who behave like butterflies, landing briefly before fluttering off again, and so the engrossing narrative is patterned: following loosely the road-trip chronology, the narrator wings her way through memories of flirting and flitting between lovers. Should she stop living like a butterfly and put down roots? The beguiling imagery captures the fragile and fleeting beauty of those loved and lost, as well as the possibilities of self‑reinvention; of shedding skins, growing wings. The author also skilfully shows the beating of a butterfly's wing causing reverberating consequences, those seemingly tiny choices that have huge effects. The further the narrator travels from her life, the closer she comes to understanding its home truths.
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