Scan barcode
A review by gorecki
Red Milk by Sjón
3.0
It’s not hard to imagine life as a train ride: you’re making your way along pre-set rails, which often have double slips allowing you to move to another track and pick another direction at will. Every once in a while you’d stop - to let someone in or out, to repair something, or because you’re just temporarily out of whatever fuel it is you’re running on. But it’s the part of people getting on and off that I’m interested in. They always seem to leave and forget something behind and so you go on your way with the traces of different people in you, their “lost and found”.
Sjón’s Red Milk is a novel of snippets that cover the short life of Icelandic Neo-Nazi Gunnar Kampen. Opening with him lying dead in a train in the UK, in just 132 pages it covers his short journey through life from his childhood to his final day aboard said train. And while at first I found the structure a little bit lacking, a little bit incomplete, it started making sense once I finished the novel: the various chapters seemed more like stations in Kampen’s life. The many stations where others got on or off, where he switched tracks and shifted his journey towards a darker and crueller destination. How Savitri Devi Mukherji planted the seed of Neo-Nazism in him and how it found a warm place to grow in Gunnar in the middle of Iceland’s landscape.
People often blame parents for their children’s mistakes or the way they turn out as grownups, which is something I never understood because it takes the weight of responsibility off the shoulders of the perpetrator. Or how people would often say “they were such a polite person, they always said hello”, as if manners are a guarantee for goodness or kindness. And I love that this short little book touches on this too: that monsters are often raised in loving families.
Though I didn’t love Red Milk as much as Sjón’s other works, I’m very glad to have read it. It gives a very interesting perspective to a dark period of history that never really ended. It’s just changed its nature and name and still lurks around stations in our lives and people who enter and leave them, dragging their muddy shoes through our carriages.
Sjón’s Red Milk is a novel of snippets that cover the short life of Icelandic Neo-Nazi Gunnar Kampen. Opening with him lying dead in a train in the UK, in just 132 pages it covers his short journey through life from his childhood to his final day aboard said train. And while at first I found the structure a little bit lacking, a little bit incomplete, it started making sense once I finished the novel: the various chapters seemed more like stations in Kampen’s life. The many stations where others got on or off, where he switched tracks and shifted his journey towards a darker and crueller destination. How Savitri Devi Mukherji planted the seed of Neo-Nazism in him and how it found a warm place to grow in Gunnar in the middle of Iceland’s landscape.
People often blame parents for their children’s mistakes or the way they turn out as grownups, which is something I never understood because it takes the weight of responsibility off the shoulders of the perpetrator. Or how people would often say “they were such a polite person, they always said hello”, as if manners are a guarantee for goodness or kindness. And I love that this short little book touches on this too: that monsters are often raised in loving families.
Though I didn’t love Red Milk as much as Sjón’s other works, I’m very glad to have read it. It gives a very interesting perspective to a dark period of history that never really ended. It’s just changed its nature and name and still lurks around stations in our lives and people who enter and leave them, dragging their muddy shoes through our carriages.