Route One (2021)

We’ve been talking about going on this camping trip ever since I came home, but I never expected anything to come of it.

Baddi is an aimless young man who returns home to Iceland to care for his terminally ill father, Hordur. A tumor has robbed him of almost everything he once took for granted and father and son now find their roles reversed. Together, they drive out of Reykjavik in an old Suzuki jeep, but their trip is beset with troubles from the start. Hordur is quickly losing his faculties, his memory, and his language, and Baddi is ill-prepared for the circumstances and the responsibility he bears for his helpless father.

This heartfelt, engaging and yet gently humorous narrative shines a light on a dysfunctional parent-child relationship and one son’s struggle to cope with an impossible situation – and say goodbye to his father.

A compelling story about life and death, about the struggle to hold onto memories and make the most of time when time is quickly running out.

R E V I E W S

“Grief often includes our unspoken words. In grief we feel remorse for everything we could have said, but never put into words; words of both love and anger, words that awaited the opportunity to emerge from the subconscious but are now too late. The unsaid makes grief more painful, but is also perhaps the foundation of grief. Without our unspoken words, regret wouldn’t be as profound. Loss can be even more painful when it occurs while a loved one is still breathing, when they lose their memory and their memories of those closest to them; when the loved one dies a mental death in the presence of immediate family and passes away before the body has fully come to rest. This is, in part, the topic of this novel. The narrator is a young, homosexual man who has returned home from unfinished studies in the USA and a relationship with a man who had filled him with joie de vivre while the romance lasted.

The book is written in the style of the road novel; the narrator and his father are on their way to the Glacier Lagoon on a camping trip. The father is seriously ill with a brain tumor and has a short time left to live…

Even though the narrative structure is simple, a road trip which takes place over the span of a few days in correct chronological order, the narrator’s flashbacks and reflections of himself, and the people closest to him manage to successfully fill in the missing pieces of his and his family’s life.