Red Milk: A Novel

by Sjón, Victoria Cribb (Translator)

Overview

WINNER OF THE SWEDISH ACADEMY'S NORDIC PRIZE 2023

A timely and provocative novel from the internationally celebrated novelist Sjón, 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. 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?

Based on the life of one of the ringleaders of a little-known neo-Nazi group that operated in Reykjavík in the late fifties and early sixties, Red Milk explores what shapes a young man and the enduring, disturbing allure of Nazi ideology.

In Red Milk, acclaimed author Sjón tells the story of Gunnar Kampen, the founder of Iceland’s antisemitic nationalist party, who has 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, through his education, his political radicalization, and his final clandestine mission to England—this taut and potent novel urges readers to confront the international legacy of twentieth-century fascism, and the often undetectable forces that drive some people to extremism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250859068
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	01/17/2023
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	4.60(w) x 7.25(h) x 0.45(d)

About the Author

Sjón’s novels have been published in more than thirty-five languages. He won the Nordic Council Literature Prize for The Blue Fox, and From the Mouth of the Whale was short-listed for both the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was received every major literary prize in Iceland. Sjón has published more than a half dozen poetry collections and has written four opera libretti and lyrics for various artists, including Björk. He is the president of the PEN International Icelandic Centre and lives in Reykjavík with his wife and two children.

Victoria Cribb has translated more than thirty books by Icelandic authors, including Arnaldur Indridason, Ragnar Jónasson, and Yrsa Sigurdardóttir. Her translations of Sjón’s Moonstone and CoDex 1962 were long-listed for the Best Translated Book Award and the PEN Translation Prize in 2017 and 2019, respectively. In 2017, she received the Ordstír honorary translation award for services to Icelandic literature. She now lives in Vienna, Austria.

Editorial Reviews

11/15/2021

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. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

2021-07-14
A young man slides into neo-Nazism in post–World War II Iceland.

The discovery of the protagonist’s body in an English railway car on Page 1 sends an unmistakable signal that this will be a grim book. But this slim novel—the account of a young man’s budding career in nationalist politics in late 1950s and early '60s Iceland, cut short when he dies of cancer at age 24—offers little insight into what brought Gunnar Pálsson Kampen to his ignoble end and even less drama in its telling. There’s nothing about Gunnar’s childhood in postwar Reykavík hinting that through his teens he’ll gradually be transformed into an activist spreading falsehoods about “global Zionism” and defending the “right of the Aryan to cultivate his heritage.” The novel’s epistolary middle section traces Gunnar’s growing attachment to far right ideology through the 1950s, as he connects with real-life characters who include George Lincoln Rockwell, longtime leader of the American Nazi Party, and Nazi sympathizer and spy Savitri Devi, both of whom spent time in Iceland during their lives, without revealing any clear reason for his growing obsession over the hold he claims the “Synagogue of Satan” has on the world or his motivation to create a political party he calls the Sovereign Power Movement in a country whose Jewish population would barely fill a small chapel. In an afterword, Sjón admits he put aside any attempt to “employ pathos or myth” and that what he was “looking for instead was what made my character normal, to the point of banality.” The flaw in that approach is that it turns Gunnar into a character who lacks sufficient depth or interest to engage the reader’s emotions, for good or ill.

The attraction of right-wing European nationalism in one man’s life receives superficial treatment in this dark story.

Kirkus Reviews