You are just back from a visit abroad after winning the lottery. Things are looking up in your life (a breakup with a child involved and underemployment clouds your history). You want nothing better than to relax in your home, play some music, have a drink, and ease back into your routine. Besides, you met someone on the plane that interests you and might lead to something else. She might even call and drop by later. Then the doorbell rings spoiling your reverie. Who is it?

What if you went to answer your door one day, looked out the window and realized your latest visitor was a very unwelcome blast from your past, a likely escaped mental patient? Would you think "Bygones" and open the door?

Or, would you like Emil Halldorsson, the lead character in Bragi Olafsson's The Pets [2008, Open Letter (University of Rochester), 164 pages, translated from the Icelandic by Janice Balfour], panic and attempt to hide the fact that you're home. 

You might succeed.

Except, you left the kettle on.

Busted.

Not quite.

In your panic, you decide to hide under your son's bed when you hear the visitor opening the back window and climbing into your apartment.

Now what?

Emil is not the brightest bulb in the world, but then neither is his visitor, Harvard Knutsson, someone he spent a few horrible weeks house sitting with years earlier. Harvard seems harmless, but not quite. He is perfectly capable of menace and violence, and a prime manipulator as well.

Although he has already been here twenty minutes or a half an hour, I still find it strange; I still can't believe it. I tell myself that I may be having a nightmare. But just maybe. There is so little chance that it is impossible. In other words, it is reality. It is reality with a capital R; the most emphatic R I have ever experienced in reality. [page 79]

Olafsson manages to take a relatively simple and universal idea (that of the unwelcome visitor) and make it somewhat interesting and comic, but also rather annoying for the reader.

I suppose The Pets is something of a frustrating read in keeping with Emil's inertia. The reader waits and waits for some sort of action or confrontation but Olafsson's story is not that simple. There are no simple answers to be found here, and Emil's failure to act unmasks a larger truth about himself and his past history with Harvard.

The reader soon learns that Emil failed to act decisively with Harvard in the past and the results foreshadow his inaction here as well. Olafsson slowly fills in the back story as the events unfold with Emil under the bed and Harvard enjoying his unannounced hospitality and entertaining a steady stream of visitors in Emil's supposed absence.

The visitors are friends, another passenger from the plane stopping by to pick up something inadvertently left with Emil, and the girl of his dreams, Greta. Never mind that Emil's current lady friend has called as well. 

[Greta drives the story in ways that Olafsson hints at, but never fully explores. Indeed, Emil's relationships with women could be underlying reason to his inertia, but that idea is left unanswered.]

What started as an uneventful day has become a larger complication the longer Emil lies under the bed, paralyzed with a mix of fear, embarrassment, and shame.  The psychological complications continue throughout the evening.  And, from his space under the bed, there's little that Emil can do. How it ends or doesn't end is something for the reader to ponder afterwards.

The story is also reminiscent of someone looking at their own funeral in some ways; the idea that someone can observe and hear how others think about and perceive them, see a bit into their true selves.

Olafsson leaves the reader with more questions at the end then the beginning. That might be by design or might be a case of running out of story threads. I'm not certain either way. I can see the need for a stronger conclusion than what is found on the page. Another few pages and perhaps Emil's inertia would give way to something else. However, I also recognize that the act of leaving more questions also aids the environment of the story as presented.

In an interview on the University of Rochester's Web site, Olafsson explains the ending this way:

"I had not decided how The Pets was going to end when I started the book, and I think that decision came rather late in the writing process. I had tried two or three different endings but always felt I was betraying myself and the story by not letting it end the way it does. I think it's a good thing when an ending of a book gives the reader the permission to decide for himself what has really been going on in the story and what will happen after he has read the last page."*

Though I found the ending a bit underwhelming, The Pets can be interpreted through different perspectives where the ending is just right. In any event, I would give the book a mild recommendation. Not a great read, but worthwhile for a library or a used bookstore find. (three stars)


Sources
* See author Bragi Olafsson interview at http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=1250

Recommended: Yes