Bragi Ólafsson

Last year I read some Halldor Laxness, and found the Icelandic humour distinctly hard to get. This contemporary novel was less oblique, but despite its relative brevity took some time to get going, but when it did it became pure farce which you could easily imagine staged.

Emil returns home from a trip abroad to find that Harvard, a certifiable lunatic he shared a house in London with for a while a few years ago is looking for him. When Harvard turns up, Emil hides under the bed rather than show more let him in.

What he doesn't bargain for is Harvard climbing in through the open window to wait for him, and then various other friends and acquantances turn up and Harvard invites them all in and entertains them with Emil's record collection and liquor cupboard. Emil elects to stay under the bed, hoping they'll all go....

The back-story of how Emil and Harvard met and how Harvard managed to kill the pets of the family they were house-sitting for in London is gradually teased out, no wonder Emil's scared to come out - still he's made his bed and must sleep on it!

This impromptu party gets through an almost Hemingwayesque amount of booze - you can feel Emil wincing and what's worse is that Greta, the girl of his dreams, who he met on the plane home, is there and it's Harvard who's entertaining her!

A quick and entertaining read but I wasn't sure about the ending. Accomplished and I would read more from Olafsson, (who was in the Sugarcubes with Bjork). show less

Translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith

It’s tough being a poet. First, there’s the whole stereotype of the cerebral, tortured artist who offers the world little but obscure verses. Then your Dad starts doing the passive-aggressive thing and slights your work whenever he can. Your son calls your career a ‘hobbyhorse’. You get no respect.

This is the world for Sturla Jon, a sucessful poet from Iceland. He’s tough, sarcastic, and is finding it hard to even respect himself show more anymore. He still writes poetry, but since he’s hit fifty, he wants to do something more. Novels, maybe. He’s dissatisfied with most of his life, and it’s starting to show:

“In Sturla’s opinion, there is an irony to this that results from a deception the poet himself perpetrates: when it comes down to it, his value is only ever evident from the price tag on the book…”

And to make one big step away from the starving artist that he imagines typical poets to be, he goes out and buys a top-notch overcoat, high style and big money. He’s old-fashioned, and decides the cell phone pocket will be perfect for his cigarettes. That one detail shows a great deal about him: he isn’t fitting in with the times.

“One moment Sturla feels there is depth and purpose to his writing but the next…he, the poet, starts to think that he can’t see anything in the production of poetry but emptiness and the surface emotion that still lifes offer: more or less beautiful textures, at best, things better suited to being the subject of a watercolor on the wall of a room.”

So with this new overcoat, and an invitation to a poetry festival in Lithuania, he makes a new plan. He’s going to move towards an experimental form of literature, and 'review' the events of the festival before it even happens. His cynical and disparaging review reflects all the clichés of poetry, and poetry festivals in general. Bad food, terrible lodging, and worse, pretentious poets who take themselves far too seriously than he thinks they deserve. His caustic review makes him feel fresh and innovative, and he leaves for Lithuania with low expectations.

However, despite the fact he condemns the poet’s lifestyle as often as possible, it’s revealing that he still wants to go. Why not just skip it? This is one of the complicating facets to Sturla: he’s not really sure what he wants to be, and at his age, it’s hard to change. His life is full of contradictions: he wins money (that he doesn't need) at a slot machine when he’s just killing time, and his aging father gets more attention from the ladies than he does. While he works part-time as a building superintendent (possibly the diametric opposite of a poet), he likes to hint to people that he’s a published poet. Who is the real Sturla?

Only in Lithuania does Sturla even begin to understand just how he fits in, and his exploits there are terrifying, frantic, and sometimes slapstick. He realizes that his “predicted” review is not only wrong, but almost criminally so.

Lest this sound too serious, keep in mind that Sturla is possibly one of the funniest characters I’ve run across. He’s snarky and witty, and throughout the narrative there is a remarkable amount of humor as he pokes fun at himself, his family, and most of all, the literary world. The author, Bragi Olafsson, writes Sturla as the least expected poetic figure: needy yet badass, sensitive but acerbic, and always unpredictable.

The book in whole is more comedic than serious. Yet it also gives a unique glimpse into the world of literature and translation, cultural disparities, and historical influences that define a geographic location. I loved the little things that make Sturla a real person: the way he’s annoyed by his Dad’s constant calls on the new cell phone he finally gets, his simple desire to just get a cup of decent coffee, and the way he mentally rehearses little remarks to himself to get them right. Additionally, Olafsson hints at the need for poetry and literature as a means of dealing with the contradictions and complexities we all face. show less

A deadpan tale of a man avoiding emotional connection. The narrator goes to increasingly absurd lengths to escape from an annoying former friend, eventually hiding under his bed while his friends and family occupy his home. The novel is strongly reminiscent of the work of Donald Antrim in the way the increasingly ridiculous situation develops without a loss of psychological credibility.

I was very pleased to receive The Pets by Bragi Olafsson as I have something of an obsession for literature in translation. We don't get a lot of it here in the US comparatively, so I am eager to get my hands on what I can. I am very excited that Open Letter, the publisher of The Pets, has dedicated itself to bringing us high quality literature in translation.

From reading some of the works of Halldor Laxness, I knew that Iceland breeds some strange minds. Olafsson is no exception. The show more premise of this work is wonderfully bizarre. A man is trapped underneath his bed (by choice) as a party unfolds in his house, which he observes as his presence remains unknown and wondered at. The sense of entrapment reminded me of Kafka's Metamorphosis for reasons I'd still like to track down.

The fact that Olafsson worked in considerable references to one Herman Melville and Moby Dick particularly endeared me to him. I read many books (and many books at once), but The Pets is the only book I have actually finished in some time. That is a high honor in my library, with so many volumes stuck with bookmarks, abandoned to uncertainty about whether they can ever woo me again. show less