butterflies in november by auður ava ólafsdóttir

four species, with more than four actual animals involved. This reads like a fairy tale in its reliance on coincidence, convenient narrative turns, and groupings of threes: It's all threes here,' she says, 'three men in your life over a distance of 300 kilometres, three dead animals, three minor accidents or mishaps… although by my count, there are actually four animals: goose, fish, sheep, whale. Where she engages in casual sex (not with tumi, obviously), oddly misogynist observations, her brand of nostalgia, an estonian choir, butterflies-as-metaphor, and it ends with more than forty recipes and some knitting tips. it was too willfully eccentric for me: an emotionally detached and unnamed woman who makes her living as a translator, fluent in upwards of ten languages but also somewhere on the spectrum is dumped by her lover and her husband on the same day, visits a fortune teller, is responsible for the death of a goose, wins two different lotteries and, despite not liking children at all, embarks on an icelandic road trip with tumi the son of a friend who isĪ deaf four-year-old clairvoyant boy with poor eyesight and one leg three centimetres shorter than the other, which makes him limp when he is only wearing his socks It's not entirely twee - it definitely has its dark moments (animals will die) but it was just so… much. Individually, all those things are great, but there's a point where it just becomes too much - a quirky overload a birthday party where manic children hopped up on frosting throw whimsy at the wall to see what'll stick.

This book is like being forced to watch amelie on a loop while bjork makes you snort pixie stix.

Butterflies in november by auður ava ólafsdóttir