Review: Barry Yourgrau, A Neo-Nazi in Iceland

A mostly invented regular boy, on a dark path

Here is a portrait of a subject alas all too salient today: a young neo-Nazi, this one surfacing in the decades right after World War II, brought to us by the Icelandic marvel of many trades, Sjón, the pseudonym, meaning “sight” or “vision,” of Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson. Sjón, now sixty-three, began as a surrealist poetry prodigy, then, inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, turned to novels like The Whispering Muse that draw on myth, Icelandic and other, with thrilling finesse. He also composes Academy-Award winning lyrics in collaboration with Björk and writes scripts for such movies as The Northman, a sword-flashing Viking revenge extravaganza.

Red Milk originally appeared in Icelandic in 2019 as Corn-Gold Hair, Gray Eyes—a title more attuned to the racialist stuff in its pages. It’s a slim book, blending actual, cited history and history-inspired invention. Narrative scenes, actual documents, fictional letters, and other “found” items stitch together the brief life of Gunnar Kampen of Reykjavik, born in the late 1930s, and based apparently on a real unnamed person. Sjón’s chronicle proceeds with calculated neutrality, sans authorial judgement—like home movie footage—through the protagonist’s jarring evolution into a committed and earnest racist and antisemite, a young founder of an Icelandic National Socialist-style party—someone who can write a sweet cheerful note to his disabled brother, for instance, even as he orders extra copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Sjón wants to argue that such folk as Gunnar aren’t monsters hatched in darkest alien realms but are, well, normal in ways, human, formed in our shared worlds.

Red Milk opens end first, with its protagonist on an English train, revealed with cinematic flair to have just died in his compartment seat. Going back then in time, we’ll see Gunnar as a young boy memorably encountering a mysterious and exotic guest in a lamp-lit side room during a dinner party—the full ominousness of the scene only blooming much later when we come to realize the guest’s identity. Gunnar’s onward narrative features his blithe confidential avowals of progressively more abhorrent views (in a letter he refers casually to the “onslaught of blacks and Jews”) accompanied by Sjón’s subtler, mystery-thriller-style plucking of details from the shadows: a scene of Gunnar’s oddly hospitable reception in the office of a respectable senior businessman comes into focus with the concluding disclosure of the latter’s former right-wing extremism.