Confessions of a Disloyal European

By Jan Myrdal

This is a new edition of a sixties classic, chosen by the New York Times as one of "ten notable books" of 1968. Jan Myrdal sat down at the age of 34 to tell the truth about himself. He ended up seven years later with a book of hard truths about the generation shaped by the war against Hitler; about the next generation, shaped by the Vietnam War; and about Western intellectuals and their claims to honesty and enlightenment.

He writes without flinching about his difficult childhood years in the U.S. and Sweden, a young man facing love and betrayal, the hardships of a writer enduring poverty and censorship, and most of all the struggle to understand his times and place himself on an honest moral and political footing. He confronts these experiences and uses them, as he says, "to make the European intellectual as a type clearly visible."

Jan Myrdal observes the Western intellectual from a unique vantage point as the son of Sweden's most celebrated intellectuals, Nobel Laureates Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, engineers of the Swedish welfare state and leaders of progressive democratic thought. These family ties give a chilling resonance to Jan's questioning of the Western tradition's claims to progress and reason.

His personal journey ends dramatically as he confronts Western racism in Asia and the preventable suicide of a friend in Stockholm. The political and the personal become inseparable, and he ends with an indictment in which she spares no one, not even himself and his own  attempts to break from lies and corruption.

The edition has a new preface by the author.
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Confessions of a Disloyal European
$19.95
paper
0-941702-26-X

Confessions of a Disloyal European
$29.95
cloth
0-941702-27-8

 

When first published, this book was chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of ten books of "particular significance and excellence in 1968."

"Jan, you lie. This is Jan Myrdal talking to himself, and it can stand for the theme of his remarkable exercise in self-analysis. In this 'fictionalized' autobiography, the 40-year-old Myrdal has tried the impossible—to tell the truth about himself, whom he sees as representative of the decadent breed of European intellectual ('by Europeans I mean Europeans all the way from the Urals to California') whose perception, analysis and moral discrimination have been powerless to stop the social and political holocausts of the twentieth century."
—Newsweek

"These pages are so unboring that sometimes you feel like crying "Uncle" for the reprieve of ennui....Jan's protest...succeeds as literature because it breathes (or curses) with the very physicalness and immediacy of his sense impressions.... He touches an especially crucial nerve in those of us who are Westerners par excellence; who are ever so emancipated, educated, sophisticated....In this book Jan Myrdal uses against himself the blackest skepticisms of psychoanalysis, the most cunning corruptions of eloquence. And still he cannot lose the breathlessness of the freshman-revolutionary. There is high art in the way he sustains that contradiction, and a dangerous poetry and long, long echoes of you and me."
—New York Times Book Review

"One hears in him—even at his most self-centered—the representative accents of his times. He seems to be the voice behind the disaffected student faces seen in newspaper photographs from all over the world. He is the prototype son of model liberals who has found the traditions of reform, of humane rationalism, just not enough."
—Christian Science Monitor