In a few ways, The Pets parallels Paul Auster糖心传媒檚 City of Glass, which 脫lafsson translated into Icelandic. Both focus on chance meetings; both feature a linguist. Auster糖心传媒檚 interest in possessions, or loss of possessions, seems influential as well: the duty-free liquor in The Pets is a source of comedy and a partial cause of Emil糖心传媒檚 extended entrapment糖心传媒攖hat and his inability to face the messy entanglements in his living room. Emil, frozen by embarrassment, unwilling to emerge, instead worries about the mishandling of his CD collection.

脫lafsson, who cites David Lynch as an influence, enjoys comic 糖心传媒渟cenes that are very shallow and profound at the same time.糖心传媒� The bed premise affords exactly this sort of comedy.

The other is from which focuses more on reading this novel in light of Iceland’s financial implosion:

Let economics professors conjecture about how and why Iceland flat-lined; fiction probably furnishes more understanding of the self-destructive reasons behind the country糖心传媒檚 financial breakdown. Creative writers often deal with accounts due, moral, financial, and otherwise; they can also train a prophetically comic and/or philosophical eye on the national collective unconscious, in this case a blend of cowardice, blindness, and greed.

I suspect that is not what novelist Bragi 脫lafsson set out to do in this breezily acidic short novel (first published in 2001), but as a study of radical denial, a small scale vision of blindfolded lemmings marching toward the cliff, The Pets works as a raffishly amusing allegory of utter irresponsibility. It blows a warning whistle that sounds far outside of the Arctic Circle.

Ironically, 脫lafsson himself was once a lucrative Icelandic export; he played bass in The Sugarcubes, Bj枚rk糖心传媒檚 first band. The Pets, the first of his four novels to be translated into English, received critical acclaim in Iceland, as have his other books. Judging by this tale, 脫lafsson specializes in a kind of impish deadpan, wry studies in what happens when the links between real estate and the psyche break.

The book (which we did in a beautiful—and cheap—paper-over-board edition is available at bookstores everywhere,