Red Milk
Winner of the Swedish Academy's Nordic Prize 2023
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE SWEDISH ACADEMY'S NORDIC PRIZE 2023
'A book like a blade of light, searching out and illuminating the darkest corners of history . . . It's vivid, unputdownable, alive, and written with unerring artfulness and subtlety.' Neel Mukherjee
Gunnar Kampen grows up in Reykjavík during the Second World War in a household fiercely opposed to Hitler and Nazism. A caring brother and son, at nineteen he seems set to lead a conventional life. Yet in the spring of 1958, he founds a covert, anti-Semitic nationalist party with ties to a burgeoning international network of neo-Nazis - a cause that will take him on a clandestine mission to England from which he never returns.
In this striking novel, inspired by one of the ringleaders of an Icelandic neo-Nazi group formed in the late 1950s, Sjón masterfully constructs the portrait of an ordinary young man who becomes a right-wing zealot. Exposing the roots of the far-right movements of today, Red Milk is a timely reminder that the seeds of extremism can be hard to detect and the allure of fascism remains dangerously potent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sjón (CoDex 1962) offers up a chilling study of an Icelandic white supremacist. In 1958, Nazi sympathizer Gunnar Pálsson Kampen reaches out to leaders of fascist movements and political parties in the U.S., Great Britain, and Sweden, hoping to gain recognition for his fledgling, small-time Sovereign Power Movement. The reader knows from the first chapter, set in 1962, that Gunnar will be found dead on a train in Britain; in an afterword, Sjón claims he used the framing device to make his story more palatable ("It is easier to deal with a dead Nazi than a living one"). Gunnar grows up in a middle-class family with an abusive father who's "afraid of Hitler." As he grows, visitors and family members drop hints of their allegiance to white supremacist ideology. One such woman, wearing a swastika broach, holds his hand up to a table lamp and declares, "Only white people let the light into themselves!" The novel becomes epistolary midway through, revealing the deepening of Gunnar's bigotry through letters written to a love interest, and Sjón keeps the brief story taut as he works his way back to Gunnar's mysterious death. This illuminating tale makes for worthy companion to anti-fascist works by Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre.
