Rarely have I found a protagonist so unrelatable, a plight so enviable, an audio book narrator so unpleasant, but still wanted to finish the whole book because even so I was enjoying the hell out of just the idea of it and curious as to how it would end, even though I already knew that how it would end was in recipes.
(This is not a spoiler because this is announced very early in the text)
Unnamed is a professional translator, fluent in 11 languages besides her native Icelandic and is very particular about words and word choices to the exclusion of much else, and so has recently found herself dumped both by her husband of four years (who has just gotten another woman pregnant and has decided he'd rather have a family with her than keep having arguments with Unnamed in which Unnamed quotes entire paragraphs from manuscripts she's working on even though they have little or nothing to do with the point of contention) and her not-terribly-secret lover (who seems to have just found their relationship kind of pointless but keeps showing up in this story anyway for Reasons) in the same day. Which would send your typical chick lit** protagonist into spirals of self-doubt if not outright self-hatred as she tries to figure out what's wrong with her, but Unnamed is not a chick lit protagonist. Whatever she is, it's not that.
Unnamed is no sooner partially settled into a new studio apartment (she still has to shelve her half of the books that are pretty much all she kept from her marriage) than her pregnant best friend has an accident on her new front steps that isn't itself so bad but winds up revealing that her pregnancy is going to be much more complicated than originally thought. The father of her unborn twins no longer on scene and the father of her fascinatingly odd four-year-old son, Tumi long gone, there is no one to care for the boy while Unnamed's friend (who gets a name, and it seems to be the same as the author's: Audr***, but I'm not sure if that's significant) is confined to the hospital until her twins are born. Except, of course, for Unnamed.
But Unnamed has been telling people that, even though it's November in Iceland, she's planning a road trip to get a fresh start on her new life as a single woman and whatnot. And she's told this to so many people, so many times, that she's convinced herself it's what she actually wants.
Fine, Audr says. Take him with you. He's the easiest kid, he's no trouble at all, he'll teach you something. He'll change you. Audr actually says this, that Tumi will change Unnamed, like that's an end in itself.
Ah, but I mentioned that Tumi is a fascinatingly odd child. He is almost completely deaf and sports a gigantic hearing aid and a speech impediment. His vision isn't so great, either, so he also sports coke bottle glasses. He reads lips pretty well but mostly communicates with people in sign languages. Meaning Unnamed has a chance to add another language to her collection.
I mean, I would say yes, too.
To sweeten the deal, Unnamed manages to win not one but two lotteries right before the pair is to set off. She's won a movable summer bungalow, to be installed at a site of her later choosing, from a private lottery, and she's won a huge cash jackpot in the Icelandic national library -- using numbers that Tumi helped her to choose. She's now one of the richest people in Iceland! But her reaction to these windfalls is mostly to take them in their stride; it now means that she can put a huge stash of cash in her little car's glovebox and not have to worry about any emergency purchases she might have to make on their way. Sleeping bags, warm clothes, goldfish and a bowl... You know, quirky Icelandic things.
And at last they set off, going counter-clockwise and against the natural flow of life and traffic on Iceland's famous ring road (which I just enjoyed a virtual visual trip along in Brendan Walter's enjoyable 2018 film Spell). The relationshp between Unnamed and Tumi becomes a comfortable one as she learns to communicate with him and to meet his small needs, mostly for "Milk" as he frequently demands from strangers they meet along the way. They meet strange men, some of whom Unnamed has sex with. Unnamed muses to herself with astonishing frequency about the inherent failings of womanhood (not a feminist icon in the making, Unnamed). Various animals die. The pair wind up unintentionally semi-stalking a male Estonian choir and their accompanying female stripper, on a performance tour of rural Iceland. Tumi gets lost a lot and inappropriately refers to a few men as Daddy. They are not always the ones Unnamed sleeps with. There's not as much stuff about languages and words as I was led to expect. A lot of weird phrases pop up that I'm not sure originate with Olafsdottir or Fitzgibbon -- stuff like Unnamed noticing amidst a melange of smells the odor of things that have been removed from their customary settings? Angele Masters sounds strident and clipped and exactly how I think Unnamed would sound if she were British, except Unnamed isn't British and while frequently I hear non-British characters narrated by British audio book narrators and it just slips below my consciousness as I listen, with Butterflies in November I can't not notice it and it bugs me but I keep listening long past when I usually stop because the narrator is bugging me.
Did I like the novel? To be honest, good question.
*Why does it seem like half of the novels I've read lately have unnamed protagonists? It makes writing about my reading so unnecessarily awkward.
**Is this still a thing, by the way?
***One obnoxious fact about listening to audio books is that you don't often find out how names are being spelled in the text without consulting dozens of book reviews and promotional sites in the hopes that someone else has shared it, or actually hunting down some direct sample text and guys, just be glad I'm jumping through the painful hoops to produce this text at all.
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