Pets by Bragi Olafsson, Janice Balfour (Translator)

From the Publisher

"Back in Reykjavik after a vacation in London, Emil Halldorsson is waiting for a call from a beautiful girl, Greta, that he met on the plane ride home, and he's just put on a pot of coffee when an unexpected visitor knocks on the door. Peeking through a window, Emil spies an erstwhile friend - Havard Knutsson, his one-time roommate and current resident of a Swedish mental institution - on his doorstep, and he panics, taking refuge under his bed and hoping the frightful nuisance will simply go away." "Havard won't be so easily put off, however, and he breaks into Emil's apartment and decides to wait for his return - Emil couldn't have gone far; the pot of coffee is still warming on the stove. While Emil hides under his bed, increasingly unable to show himself with each passing moment, Havard discovers the booze, and he ends up hosting a bizarre party for Emil's friends, and Greta." An alternately dark and hilarious story of cowardice, comeuppance, and assumed identity, the breezy and straightforward style of The Pets belies its narrative depth, and disguises a complexity that grows with every page.

Kirkus Reviews

Icelandic novelist ilafsson's English-language debut is part Beckettian or even Kafkaesque black comedy, part existentialist novel in the Paul Auster mode, and part locked-room mystery in which the murderee is alive and well and hiding in the bedroom. The narrator of this work by the Sugarcubes' former bassist spends most of the novel cowering under his own bed. Emil has just returned to Reykjavik after a trip to London to blow some of his lottery windfall. As he settles down with his 36 new CDs, there's a knock on the door. Peering through the curtains, he recognizes Havard, the erratic and violent drunk who, while helping Emil pet-sit in London years before, disappeared with two valuable items after having managed to kill three of the four animals in their care. (Two he dispatched via an unfortunate accident involving wet cement, and then, the last straw, he beheaded the homeowners' iguana for biting him.) Emil thought he'd never see Havard again, who was packed off to Sweden after numerous entanglements with the law. Yet here he is, and so Emil-sensibly, more or less-scrambles under the bed and waits for his old bogeyman to give up knocking. Havard, though, gets in through the window, ostensibly to remove the teapot left boiling, and begins poking through the apartment and drinking Emil's duty-free booze as he awaits his host's arrival home. Throughout the evening, more people arrive: a linguist Emil sat beside on the plane, whose spectacles he inadvertently brought home; Greta, the fantasy girl of his youth whom he met again in a lavatory queue on the flight; and several friends come to claim their gift CDs. Before long Havard is hosting a bizarre, alcohol-soaked party/vigil, withEmil observing events from his hidden vantage point. Dark, strange, elusive, compelling and oddly charming.

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