4 ideas
She recruits Arnór, a young Icelandic neo-Nazi, as a research subject and then becomes his lover alongside her boyfriend Ómar. The case shows the scholarly distance between observer and extremist collapsing into intimacy, desire, and mutual influence.
The novel treats evil not as a monstrous essence but as something assembled from mundane acts: jealousy, vanity, loneliness, conformity, and the wish to belong. The 1941 killings in a small Lithuanian town and petty cruelties in present-day Reykjavík relationships run on the same mechanism at different scales. This makes atrocity continuous with everyday life rather than an exception to it.
Arnór's attraction to neo-Nazism is read less as a doctrine he has reasoned his way into than as a way of gaining identity, attention, and a place in a group. Seen this way, radicalization is driven by emotional and social needs that ideology later justifies.
The novel tracks how open neo-Nazi symbolism is a political dead end, while the same resentments repackaged as mainstream nationalist populism become speakable and electable. Surface respectability changes an idea's reach without changing its core content. Agnes's academic subject, the line between the far right and the populist mainstream, is dramatized as porous rather than fixed.