A review by piedwarbler
Red Milk by Sjón

challenging dark medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Red Milk by Sjón

This book was first published in Icelandic in 2019, and I read about it when I visited Reykjavik last March. 

A powerful story told in snapshots; a letter here, an incident there, about how an ordinary boy in Iceland becomes a right-wing extremist in the 1950s and early 60s. How does one become beguiled by fascist ideology? This is a taut and serious novel which takes as its inspiration the life of a real neo-Nazi. 

Sjón says, “I wanted to … begin to understand what makes it possible for people to heed the call of Nazism in all its guises.” 

I found this book, which begins with the dead body of Gunnar Kampen on a train in England, sombre, spare, and a sad examination of an ordinary person’s descent into evil. 

Sjón says of the book:

“In my research … I had come across information about a small neo-Nazi group that operated in Reykjavik in the late '50s and early '60s. Not much was known about it and if it was written about at all it was usually brushed off as an aberration in our post-war history.

But when I decided to take a closer look at the subject of National Socialism and Iceland it was this particular group that caught my writer's imagination, as there is always an opportunity for fiction in wilfully forgotten, repressed stories. And as my research uncovered the fact that one of the main actors within that small group had not only been in close contact with … the very people who laid the foundation for the international network of far right movements as we know it today - but had died from cancer at a young age while fanatically working on the foundation of their World Union of National Socialists, then I knew I had found a character who could carry that … story.”