A butterfly in November

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A butterfly in November. Novel. With forty-seven recipes and knitting instructions (in the original Rigning í November , 2004) is a work by the Icelandic bestselling author Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir , which was published in 2013 in a German translation by Sabine Leskopf at Insel Verlag in Berlin. Thematically, the work revolves around self-encounter and living together, around understanding and learning to understand.

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Elisabeth takes care of Tumi, the four-year-old son of her best friend Auður, when she prematurely goes to a clinic for a complicated pregnancy with twins, where the date for her delivery is set for December 24th. Auður also gives her an appointment with her fortune-teller, which Elisabeth attends, although she initially thinks she cannot do anything with it. In the course of history some of the prophecies seem to be fulfilled. At the beginning of the novel, Elisabeth is still married, but soon no longer; their more or less spontaneous sexual encounters with men continue as before. She moves and stacks her belongings in a side room of her office in Reykjavík, which she uses for her work as a translator. Then she first wins a holiday home including the service of having it set up at a location of her choice and shortly afterwards the main prize in another lottery, so that she is financially completely independent for a while. In November, she and Tumi set off to their new holiday home in the East Fjords, where she spent the summers with grandmother as a child and where they are accompanied by a butterfly. At the end of the book, Tumi and Elisabeth go back “to town” to celebrate Christmas with Elisabeth's mother. In the meantime, Tumi has taught the narrator a lot, including how to simply ignore gawkers who seem to have never seen a small, self-confident person with a hearing aid and strong glasses.

Structure of the plant

The work consists of two parts. On pages five to 308 there is “A butterfly in November” (with the outline of a butterfly as a graphic), “The narrator's recipes. Forty-seven recipes and knitting instructions ”can be found on pages 309 to 356 (with a fish head up to the middle of the body as a graphic). The first part begins with a dedication (“For Melkorka Sigriður”) and a “childhood riddle”: “Where are there cities but no houses / streets but no cars / forests but no trees? // Answer: on the map ”, followed by 65 chapters, counting from“ zero ”, which is the only chapter that is completely in italics and in which it is said at the beginning:“ So this is how it looks to me today, if I look back and may not be able to remember everything in sequence. ”64 of the chapters are between one and eight and a half pages long, with most of them between two and a half and four pages long. In the sixth chapter, with 13.5 pages the longest of the book, the narrator's husband, who later divorced, lists his reasons for separation, informs her about his marriage plans as well as the desire to have children and lets his wife invite him to dinner (see recipe “Wild goose with Side dishes and jelly sauce ”).

Reviews

youngest first

expenditure

  • in Icelandic (original language): Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, Rigning í nóvember , Salka, Reykjavík 2004, ISBN 9789979768319
  • in French: L'embellie: roman , translation: Catherine Eyjólfsson, Paris, Zulma 2012, ISBN 9782843045899
  • in Italian: La donna è un'isola , translation: Stefano Rosatti, Einaudi, Torino 2013, ISBN 978-88-06-21541-5
  • in Spanish: La mujer es una isla , translation: Elías Portela, Madrid, Punto de Lectura 2013, ISBN 9788466327473
  • in English: Butterflies in November , translation: Brian Fitzgibbon, London, Pushkin 2013, ISBN 9781782270102
  • in German : A butterfly in November. Novel. With forty-seven recipes and knitting instructions , translation: Sabine Leskopf, 356 p., Insel Verlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-458-17581-0

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Information on the author and work on the publisher's website Suhrkamp / Insel