Sjón...employs an intentional, methodical restraint to examine the survival of Nazism post-World War II ... Sjón’s policy of omission—of drama, psychology, violence, grandeur of any kind—results in a delicious tension. He tempts us to expect so much of the novel, and though he never provides the relief of clean culminations, he manages to keep the reader wanting. More than anything, we want Gunnar to either damn or to redeem himself, but he refuses to be anything more than a tempest in a teacup—a chess piece carved in ivory rather than ebony ... This is not a psychoanalytic assessment of what draws him to Nazism so as much as a collection of images, inputs, choices, and feedback that nudge him there ... the novel offers not so much a comment on the dangers or the spread of fascism as on the very littleness, the randomness, of being human. The novel turns a monster into a shadow. But it is a trick. The monster is real.

... the normally parsimonious Sjón has topped himself, chiseling his narrative down to its very armature. Red Milk takes its barebones form literally, stripping away everything it can to pursue an autopsy of its odious fictional character ... The landscape of Red Milk is built of such lightning bursts of strangely sharp detail, where the use of colors stands out. It’s a subtle stroke in a novel whose quiet complexity can at first seem elusive: even though the book is in a sense a flashback from Gunnar’s moment of death in his early manhood, this is a landscape proper to a child’s imagination, dreamlike but solid, with all the pronounced lucidity and wild agency that objects and colors assume. Red Milk is no less subtle—or complex—in its caution with language ... Throughout Red Milk, Gunnar is barely there, yet unbearably present. In this short and bleak novel, Sjón makes us think again about what empathy can—and frequently enough simply can’t—achieve.

... perplexing ... Sjón’s sentences are so artistically entrancing that I found myself reading them out loud ... Red Milk...is as minimal as it is mysterious and disturbing ... an admirable but ultimately unsatisfying account of why one drifts toward extremism and commits oneself to an identity capable of causing mass murder. Don’t get me wrong: the writing is certainly satisfying ... I say unsatisfying because Sjón deliberately limited his scope, choosing for his subject a man who died before he could make any mark on the world. In other words, there aren’t any dramatic scenes in Red Milk, no speeches full of pathos, no mystical ideologies linking modern fascism to the Nordic pantheon, not even a manifesto. The symbols drop steadily but subtly ... But otherwise, Gunnar’s childhood is rather banal. And when he does finally express his views, they’re of the most typical, unoriginal variety ... Does giving serious attention to neo-Nazi figures afford their ideas more power, or less? ... And instead of seeing Gunnar in action, we mostly get to know him through his letters, a passive approach that leaves me wanting more.

Like all good murder mysteries, Red Milk opens with the discovery of a corpse ... What follows in this slim, swift novel is the story of how this body ended up on that carriage, associated with the belief system implied by the drawing ... Yet the form of the novel makes this difficult: Red Milk is no Bildungsroman of a young fascist, and it largely eschews any representation of Gunnar’s thoughts. His actions are described, his letters presented, but his inner psychology remains largely off-limits. If this seems intentional...Red Milk also fails to imagine the inner experience of one man’s slide from such normality to the worst kind of evil. Or perhaps it refuses the act of empathy this would entail to make Sjón’s point. For what the novel does show is the intensely social nature of right-wing extremism ... It is a way of being together in the world; and a collective commitment to destroying the world of others.

[A] brisk, slim book ... The chapters move like the prose equivalent of flip-book images, quick and evocative ... 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 ... 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 ... But because these moments come so rarely, in the end the novel has a slightness that feels out of step with its themes ... 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.

... a chilling study of an Icelandic white supremacist ... Sjón keeps the brief story taut as he works his way back to Gunnar’s mysterious death. This illuminating tale makes for worthy companion to anti-fascist works by Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre.

... this slim novel...offers little insight into what brought Gunnar Pálsson Kampen to his ignoble end and even less drama in its telling ... Sjón admits he put aside any attempt to 'employ pathos or myth' and that what he was 'looking for instead was what made my character normal, to the point of banality.' The flaw in that approach is that it turns Gunnar into a character who lacks sufficient depth or interest to engage the reader’s emotions, for good or ill. The attraction of right-wing European nationalism in one man’s life receives superficial treatment in this dark story.