Another World

Jan Myrdal

Grand Prize for the Novel (Sweden)

One of Sweden's leading writers recreates the look and feel of New York in 1938, seen through the eyes of an eleven-year old who is changing worlds. The stunning fidelity to the language, fantasies and realities of childhood won this book Sweden's Grand Prize for the Novel and The Esselte Prize for Literature for its sequel, Twelve Going on Thirteen.

Myrdal's three autobiographical novels about childhood began as scandals for their unflattering picture of his Nobel-Prize-winning parents, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, but were later hailed as classics of Swedish literature, celebrated for their recreation of the inner world of childhood.

In Another World, Gunnar comes to America "to solve the Negro problem," but Jan leaves Sweden to become an American. He is eleven-years old and struggling to leave behind the humiliations of childhood, as he grapples with the language, manners, and realities of a strange new culture and the adult world.

Jan walks the streets of New York. He goes to the World's Fair and drinks ice cream sodas. He knows all there is to know about volacanos and steam engines. He reads Creepy Stories and listents to the radio, and he sneaks looks at that picture of the girl in Alice in Wonderland, her dress billowing up as she falls down the rabbit hole. He goes to an experimental school fo the children of intellectuals and world leaders. He reads his mother's psychlogy books to defend himself against the prying questions of the school psychologist.

Jan is tough now. No longer so easily hurt. He knows how to be somewhere else when Gunnar is talking to him, and he knows what to expect from his mother.

But most of all, he listens and watches. We see New York and America on the eve of World War II, how the progressive intellectuals ofthe Thirties thought and lived, and how they looked to a boy unimpressed by their pretensions. Like all children, he is attuned to the hypocrisies and strange ways of adults.

"No one outside the family knows what our family is really like. I could not even tell my paternal grandmother. She wouldn't want to know. She would just tell me I shouldn't pay any attention to it, and that Alva and Gunnar were like that, and they didn't mean anything by it. But I know that Gunnar really does. One mustn't say anything or mention it to outsiders. I can't talk about it with anyone. Ever."

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.