Twelve Going on Thirteen

Jan Myrdal

"Darkly lyrical . . . bitterly beautiful . . ."
  --NY Times Book Review

"I am my own person now. I looked Alva right in the eye and said I didn't belong to their family any more, I wasn't a part of it any more. Again they sacrifice us to their political ambitions and talk about their noble principles."

This story took place long before Gunnar Myrdal won the Nobel Prize in Economics and Alva Myrdal won the Nobel Peace Prize.  Long before Jan became the notorious "disloyal European," long before his autobiographical novels about childhood shocked Sweden with their scathing portraits of the private life of the founders of Sweden's welfare state. The novels began as scandals and became classics.

Jan Myrdal is twelve going on thirteen. It is 1939, the war in Europe has begun. The war between Jan and his parents continues. 

In this autobiographical novel about childhood, Jan Myrdal recreates the look and feel of New York and Stockholm at a turning point in his life and the world's, the outbreak of World War II. He despairs as his parents return him to Sweden, prisoner of  a family torn apart by culture, politics and ambition.

Through an uncanny entry into a child's language and experience, Myrdal relives his shame and anger, his awakening sexuality, his escape into an elaborate fantasy system, and his passion for knowing the world—its people, its machines, its politics.

The story is told without sentimentality or nostalgia, with the language and feeling of a boy open to the sweet and bitter tastes of childhood.

The first of Myrdal's autobiographies about his early years, Childhood, was almost suppressed before it became a best-seller; the next, Another World, won the Grand Prize for the Novel; and Twelve Going on Thirteen won the Esselte Prize for Literature, with 100,000 copies given free to schoolchildren in Sweden. The outspoken critic of "the Swedish model" has become part of the curriculum.

Jan Myrdal  is the author of more than 60 books. The titles best known to English readers are Report from a Chinese Village," called "a social classic" by Harrison Salisbury, and the Sixties classic, Confessions of a Disloyal European. One of Sweden's leading intellectuals, he has written political and social commentary, art and literary criticism, novels, poetry, and plays. He has also curated exhibitions, made feature films and TV documentaries, and has edited scholarly editions of Balzac, Diderot and Strindberg. He maintains a controversial presence in Swedish political and cultural life through frequent TV and newspaper commentaries.

  
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12 Going on 13
 $24.95
cloth
1-884468-01-2


 
 

 

 

"The astonishing variety of young Jan's thoughts and fantasies—by turns esthetic, sexual and violent—[is] all vividly rendered in darkly lyrical prose...[Myrdal] forc[es] the reader to explore the nature and interrelationship of parenthood, accomplishment and fame...[a] bitterly beautiful book." 
—New York Times Book Review

"This searing self-portrait...is told from the point of view of a rebellious, wounded preadolescent. It opens in New York City in 1940, where 12-year-old Jan had been attending school, then moves to Sweden, where his parents leave him with his aunt and uncle while they travel. Hitler's invading armies are taking over Europe, and Jan, though embroiled in his own private domestic hell, castigates the hypocrisy of pious Swedes who ring churchbells on Sundays yet refuse to speak out against the Nazis or to take up arms...Myrdal's fiercely honest account of how he resisted and overcame parental psychological abuse has the emotional intensity of a Strindberg play." —Publishers Weekly

"An absorbing read by any standard, 12 Going on 13
documents both Mr. Myrdal's fervid imagination and his awakening moral conscience."
—Baltimore Sun

"The youth who appears here is a skillful conjurer; one who enjoys great flights of fantasy that illuminate his splendid isolation and alienation. And having survived this ordeal in reality, Myrdal, with his gifted imagination, imbues the fluid, wonderfully descriptive pose with dignity and grace."
—Booklist

"World War II has broken out. Jan wants to stay in America, but Alva and Gunnar force him to return with them to Sweden, jeopardizing his future, he feels, for the sake of their public-spirited image. But by now, he is beginning to fight back. From Mark Twain, Leadbelly's music, Native American history and other sources, he constructs a positive image of himself as a rebel. His fantasies grow more elaborate. We see him turning into the frank, acerbic writer who has produced films, plays and some 60 books." 
—Los Angeles Times

Twelve Going on Thirteen, the third of Jan Myrdal's autobiographical novels about childhood, won the Esselte Prize for Literature. The second, Another World, won Sweden's Grand Prize for the Novel.  Here is what critics in the U.S. said about the first of these novels, Childhood.

"All his life Jan Myrdal has prided himself on being a maverick. Now this maverick has taken his place in the forefront of Swedish letters."
   —Harrison Salisbury, in the introduction to Childhood.

"The son of Swedish Nobel Laureates Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, the author here offers an unsentimental, deeply personal memoir of his childhood from five to eleven... Through exercising brutal candor, Myrdal relates...magical times...as well as the anger and hurt caused by parents who could not seem to love him...straightforwardly and beautifully written, successfully evoking emotions without manipulating the reader."
   —Publishers Weekly

"Remarkable...blends hair-raising reality with the visionary."
   —Boston Globe

"A gift to world literature."
   —Washington Times