Red Milk
A Novel
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3.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE SWEDISH ACADEMY'S NORDIC PRIZE 2023
A timely and provocative novel about a mysterious Icelandic neo-Nazi and the enduring global allure of fascism.
In England in 1962, an Icelandic man is found dead on a train bound for Cheltenham Spa. In his possession, policemen find a map on which a swastika has been drawn with a red pen. Who was he, and where was he going?
In a novel that reads as both biography and mystery, the internationally celebrated novelist Sjón tells the story of Gunnar Kampen, the founder of Iceland’s antisemitic nationalist party, with ties to a burgeoning network of neo-Nazi groups across the globe. Told in a series of scenes and letters spanning Kampen’s lifetime—from his childhood in Reykjavík during the Second World War, in a household strongly opposed to Hitler and his views, through his education, political radicalization, and final clandestine mission to England—Red Milk urges readers to confront the international legacy of twentieth-century fascism and the often unknowable forces that drive some people to extremism.
Based on one of the ringleaders of a little-known neo-Nazi group that operated in Reykjavík in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this taut and potent novel explores what shapes a young man and the enduring, disturbing allure of Nazi ideology.
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.
