Red Milk (2019)

An extraordinary and original writer.

We should consider ourselves fortunate to live in the age of Sjón.

He is a master of atmosphere, a fine observer of the cross hatchings of human motivation.

…a tribute to the magnitude of Icelandic author Sjón’s talents, to his self-restraint, attention to potent detail and gossamer-light lyrical touch in recounting world history on a human scale. Red Milk is another Sjón-stunner, his seventh novel in English translation by his great collaborator, Victoria Cribb. There’s also a certain neatness in the fact that one of the world’s greatest storytellers is himself from a tiny island, a stone’s throw away from the gigantic global events of mainland history.

A book like a blade of light, searching out and illuminating the darkest corners of history . . . It’s vivid, unputdownable, alive, and written with unerring artfulness and subtlety.

This is a masterfully written book, how it tackles the ideology is compelling.

Red Milk is a wonder of beauty, yet a terrifying mosaique that gradually becomes whole in the reader’s mind.

One of this story’s assets, and that of historical novels in general, is that it enables authors and readers to re-visit historical events, not exactly as they occured, but rather as we feel they were, so we readers are able to see through the eyes of those who preceded us, we see the events and we understand them from different points of view, and hopefully manage to forge a sensible connection to the past, based on feeling and reason.. ... This story is a cleverly composed mosaique, we are not shown all the fragments, and they are not at all presented in a chronological order, yet gradually, the image becomes clear, and the main character comes alive and understandable to us ... Sjón’s way of telling a tale is shifting throughout this book: it starts as a third-person account, almost neutral to begin with, like an article in a newspaper, followed by chapters told from the main character’s point of view. In the second part of three, the author makes a radical shift in the story, using different ways of telling the story, through private letters, news items, even a telegram, and then he goes back to the third-person mode. ... The most important point made in this historical novel by Sjón is the revelation of an Icelandic point of view adapted to this ideology; it is a good thing to remind ourselves that the “innocence” of the island nation is an illusion and there are always those who seek out totalitarian forces, and this discourse must be handled firmly, also with the tools of poetry, like Sjón does with this book, and that might be the method that will prove the most efficient and lasting.