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Childhood

by Jan Myrdal

"Childhood" was a scandal which became a classic.

This book's revisionist look at the private lives of the founders of the Swedish welfare state was so scandalous it was almost suppressed in Sweden. Sissela Bok's "Alva Myrdal" was written in response, to give Jan's mother's point of view on this fascinating, troubled family.

But Childhood is first of all a story about the intense experience of childhood stripped of all sentimentality, seen again with a child's naive openness to all of its sensual wonder, fantasies, and anger.

Jan Myrdal's novels about his childhood have already become classics in Sweden, where the most recent history of Swedish literature called them "one of our literature's most remarkable descriptions of how a self is created."

Myrdal insists that this book is "a story about childhood, not an autobiography." And it is not necessary for the reader to know that the Alva in the book is the Alva Myrdal who won the Nobel Peace Prize and the Gunnar is the Gunnar Myrdal who wrote "An American Dilemma" and won the Nobel Prize for Economics.

But it is part of the background of the book that the Myrdals as individuals, not as a family, have had a dominating intellectual influence in Sweden since the end of the 1920s.

It is also part of the background of this book that it was a major scandal. "Childhood" takes you into the private life of Sweden's intellectual and political establishment, showing it to you through the yes of a child unimpressed by its pretensions, a child who was to become "Jan Myrdal, the insolent, the intolerant, the merciless critic of Swedish social-democracy" (Le Monde).

Although Myrdal was already a best-selling author in Sweden, he had to fight to get "Childhood" published, and it was almost marginalized in a small, limited edition. But he circumvented attempts to suppress the book by reading it on the radio and serializing it in a major daily, forcing the controversy into the open. "Childhood" soon became a best-seller and later was accepted as a classic.

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Childhood.jpg
Childhood
 $24.95
cloth 0-941702-29-4


 
 

 

 

 

"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 11...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....This book is straightforwardly and beautifully written, successfully evoking emotions without manipulating the reader."
   —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"Remarkable...The viewpoint of the child...is acutely rendered. A chapter that begins, "One late winter day I drowned," blends hair-raising reality with the visionary...Yet, oddly enough, if the atmosphere of "Childhood" sometimes evokes an Ingmar Bergman film, passions congealing into icy solitude, the overall mood is tender and lyrical."
   —Robert Taylor, Boston Globe

"A gift to world literature."
   —Washington Times

"His autobiography will remain alive in Swedish literature for a very long time...It is great literature."
   —Maria Bergom Larsson, Aftonbladet

"Artistically, the...truest thing any Swedish writer has written during the past few decades."
   —Caj Lundgren, Svenska Dagbladet

"Jan Myrdal is Sweden's best writer. Whenever he travels abroad it becomes silent in Sweden."
   —Ivar Lo-Johansson

"When he reworks episodes and events he visualizes them with almost hallucinatory sharpness. He is where he writes...he approaches the child's world with insight and absolute respect.... Need I say this is living literature?"
   —Peter Curman, Stockholms Tidningen

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