How a Boy in Rural Iceland Became a Tool for Global Fascism

RED MILK
By Sjón
Translated by Victoria Cribb

When we met Gunnar Kampen — the protagonist of “Red Milk,” the new novel from the internationally acclaimed Icelandic author Sjón — it’s 1962 and he’s dead: keeled over in his pajamas on a London train, a swastika-emblazoned map in his pocket. From there we jump back to the 1940s and see Kampen as a child, headed out on a day trip with his parents and sisters, not a swastika in sight. The rest of this brisk, slim book, which is best read in a single sitting, is animated by the question of how Kampen got from A to B. How did a boy from rural Iceland become a man traveling abroad as an errand boy for the cause of global fascism?

The chapters move like the prose equivalent of flip-book images, quick and evocative. Here’s Kampen watching his father fearfully listen to news of Hitler’s victories on his shortwave radio. Here he is learning German from the head of a local cycling club, a Nazi sympathizer. Here he is as a teenager, writing passionate letters to neo-Nazis around the world, including a Norwegian uncle he’s never met, briefing them on his efforts to keep the fascist flame alive in Iceland, enjoying the thrill of commiserating with like-minded souls across the globe.

Sjón’s story, based on research into a real-life band of Icelandic neo-Nazis, dovetails nicely with current preoccupations about the resurgence of fascism. The main message — made explicit in an afterword — is that most Nazis were people just like you and me, “normal to the point of banality,” their actions informed by universal emotions like the desire for belonging. This is hardly an original insight, but it’s surely true, and worthy terrain for literary art, still our great form for exploring how ideas live in the real world. Unfortunately, “Red Milk” is too fast-moving to leave much room for banality: Because the total number of incidents is so low, almost all of them are immediately pressed into meaning as another way station on Kampen’s road to Nazism. More than once I was reminded of cheesy biopics, which distort life by including scenes only for their ability to chart a journey the destination of which we already know.

The novel feels boldest when it moves toward embracing the quotidian, letting Nazism drift to the edges of the frame. Writing to his mother during a trip to Germany, Kampen dwells not on the influence of international Jewry or the importance of physical strength, but on the luxury of German trains, the pleasure of apple strudel, the beautiful views of the Alps. (“Yesterday we were shown the Dachau concentration camp north of Munich,” he says, and that’s all we hear on the subject.) In an enclosed letter to his mentally ill younger brother, he describes the rabbits he saw in the countryside. By tarrying for a while with the everyday — the ultimate site of real politics — Sjón gets at how endlessly interesting it can be, and how much it can contain and conceal.

But because these moments come so rarely, in the end the novel has a slightness that feels out of step with its themes. (It’s possible that “Red Milk” will feel different to readers in Iceland, where, according to Sjón’s afterword, the existence of Nazi sympathizers is something of a repressed zone in the national psyche.) Many of Sjón’s other novels (my favorites include “The Blue Fox” and “The Whispering Muse”) are equally slim, but feel capacious thanks in part to the casual inclusion of surreal and supernatural elements: golems, enchanted foxes, walking corpses, presented not as explanations for life’s infinite strangeness, or even metaphors for it. They’re just there, evoking a current of mystery that runs across eras and traditions, and can’t be reduced to any simple thesis.

It would be easy to see real-life Nazism and fascism as subjects too important for Sjón’s usual trickster tool kit. But transcending the mere facts of history to enter the realm of art will always mean taking risks about how stories are told and retold. In “Red Milk,” the overall feeling of inadequacy might have less to do with the small number of pages and more with the author’s abundance of caution, born — quite understandably — from his awareness of great danger lurking nearby.