It seems that all of the Icelandic fiction I’ve read up till now was genre variety, from mystery thrillers to ghost stories, featuring primarily contemporary settings (outside of flashbacks). It was time for proper literature, a work of historical fiction no less. And so…Red Milk. Infinitely more ominous than all other milks out there. The most nourishing of substances tinged with blood.
This novel, despite its slender size, is a sledgehammer albeit a cleverly subtle one. It speaks more to the banality of evil than its grandiosity. At a very basic level it’s a portrait of a young man as a neo nazi. Set during and in the decades following WWII, it’s a story of a young man of Icelandic and Norwegian descent growing up and coming to age admiring fascism more and more and then getting directly involved with it, setting up a local neo nazi party. The narrative comprises biographical sketches, epistolary entries of various correspondences and more until slowly the grand design of a person emerges. It’s a really ingenious approach to something that might have been easily done in a much cruder fashion with much broader brushstrokes. The author was inspired by a real life person and real life events in creating this book and thus brought to it all the complexity of real life and every effort to understand how a person like that might come to be. Is it a seemingly innocuous conglomeration of random occurrences, such as a quisling for an uncle or a neighbor’s language club or it is more than that? What does it take for someone to develop such a dangerous and horrible system of beliefs? What a resonant question to contemplate in this day and age of the ever increasing radical ideologies. At any rate, from both psychological and pure readership perspective, this made for a fascinating read. All the more so because Iceland is a country just far enough off the sidelines to have been only distantly affected by WWII, comparable to the rest of Europe, but apparently it hasn’t emerged completely unscathed either, for an event of such grand evil it’s only fitting to ripple so far and so wide and so malevolently. So a historical perspective…also covered. All in all, a great find and an excellent introduction to a new author for me. I’d certainly read more of his work, given a chance. Very good read indeed. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2023
Categories |