Childhood
- Book Review,
by Jan Myrdal, Christine Swanson (Translator)
From Publishers Weekly
The son of Swedish Nobel laureates Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, the author ( Confessions of a Disloyal European ) here offers an unsentimental, deeply personal memoir of his childhood from five to 11. He strips away the social and intellectual pretenses of his famous, worldly parents, revealing their contempt for the "problem child" they believed they had been saddled with. Though exercising brutal candor, Myrdal relates much that is good--magical times spent with his beloved grandparents on their farm; school friends; mischief-making--as well as the anger and hurt caused by parents who could not seem to love him. We learn, too, of life in Sweden during the Depression and World War II. Particularly haunting is an account of how young Myrdal fell into ice floes near his home, barely escaping death. Ably translated from the Swedish, this book is straightforwardly and beautifully written, successfully evoking emotions without manipulating the reader. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Myrdal is the author of such books as Report from a Chinese Village (LJ 6/15/65) and Return to a Chinese Village (LJ 6/1/84). He is also the son of noted Swedish intellectuals Gunnar and Alva Myrdal. In this memoir he explores his first years in Sweden in the 1920s and 1930s and is critical of his parents and their lifestyle. Myrdal re-creates the private world of a boy and his feelings about family and friends. With timeless clarity he describes the reasoning and actions of a child: jumping expectantly on winter ice, running through his parents' house late at night. This was first published in Sweden in 1982. Interest may be prompted by Myrdal's sister Sissela Bok's Alva Myrdal ( LJ 6/1/91), although Childhood is a very different type of book: an intimate voyage of discovery rather than a biography. Recommended for public and academic libraries.- Gwen Gregory, U.S. Courts Lib., PhoenixCopyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
This boyhood memoir begins with five-year-old Jan running through the dark--a nighttime ritual he played out despite the chagrin of his chronically disapproving parents. Here, Myrdal (India Waits, 1986, etc.) describes his unconventional early years with a strong, sometimes disquieting candor, capturing the peculiar ways adults talk to children and conveying his own survival techniques (``Whatever you did it was important not to leave traces''; ``You had to choose your words so you were not understood''). Myrdal is the son of Nobel Laureates Gunnar and Alva, celebrated social scientists who failed to check their academic miens at the door. With no interest in the boy's feelings, Gunnar constantly scrutinized and joked about Jan's behavior with visiting friends; Alva, who recorded their conversations in a notebook, omitted Jan from her official records after 1940 and, when he was fully grown, denounced him to US immigration authorities. Both parents left him, early and often, in the care of relatives who at least provided an honest welcome and a sense of home. Meanwhile, Myrdal never developed much of a relationship with either of his preferred (and ostensibly planned) younger sisters--not Kaj, who neglected to tell her own daughter of his existence, nor Sissela (Bok), whom he here calls ``as phony as a three-Crown coin.'' Confused and angered by the family characterization of him as a ``problem child,'' the author was nevertheless able to make friends and connect with relatives, enjoy typical boyhood pleasures (attempting to build a tree house, jumping on ice floes), and retain an imaginative inner life that neither parent could violate for long. Myrdal pursues these memories and their emotional precipitates as vigorously he does as the scenes of family life. Myrdal's memoir caused a stir in Sweden, but even those who don't know the elder Myrdals and their work or the author's previous books will read it as an evocative re-creation of life as seen by a child. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Den svenska litteraturen The History of Swedish Literature, vol VI 1950-1985
"In the clear images and sensations of the moment, the author recalls the boy he was fifty years earlier, on whom the 1930s pedagogical project was tried and whom came to regard himself as a failure of rationality. "These prose stories are one of literature's most remarkable descriptions of how an ego is created. Myrdal has entered childhood and the teenage years and speaks from their perspective. The principle of the description is as simple as it is difficult: everything must remain as it once was for him as he grew up. The child reports matter-of-factly about his childhood and give back its images with uncensored sharpness. The reader meets, on could say, a "pre-conscious" Jan Myrdal. But it is Jan Myrdal who formed him."
Peter Curman, Stockholms Tidningen
"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?"
Ivar Lo-Johansson
"Jan Myrdal is Sweden's best writer. Whenever he travels abroad it becomes silent in Sweden."
Caj Lundgren, Svenska Dagbladet
"Artistically, the...truest thing any Swedish writer has written during the past few decades."
Maria Bergom Larsson, Aftonbladet
"His autobiography will remain alive in Swedish literature for a very long time...It is great literature."
Washington Times
"A gift to world literature."
Robert Taylor, Boston Globe
"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."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"This book is straightforwardly and beautifully written, successfully evoking emotions without manipulating the reader."
Harrison Salisbury, in the introduction to "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."
Book Description
"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. The second book in Myrdal's childhood series, "Another World," won the Literature Foundation's Great Prize for the Novel. The Third, "Twelve Going on Thirteen," won the Esselte Prize for Literature and was distributed free to 100,000 of Sweden's middle school children-a strange fate for Sweden's most outspoken oppositional figure. Myrdal's autobiography about his teenage and adult years, "Confessions of a Disloyal European," was chosen by The New York Times as "one of ten books of particular significance and excellence in 1968." The celebrated French critic Bernard Pivot selected it as one of the Scandinavian classics in his TV series/book/exhibition, La bibliotheque ideale.
About the Author
Childhood won the Great Prize for the Novel for 1982 from Sweden's Literary Foundation; the third volume, Twelve Going on Thirteen, won the Esselte Prize for Literature, with free copies distributed to all of Sweden's middle school children. Myrdal has become widely regarded as Sweden's most important writer and intellectual, with a national importance possible only in a country like Sweden. When he had a heart attack a few years ago, the largest daily newspaper, a sensational tabloid, Expressen, had its front page completely filled with a headline about it. On his 60th birthday cabinet ministers, labor leaders, religious leaders as well as writers and artists came to his door with gifts (he lives two hours from Stockholm). In this country, he is known mainly for his writing about China (Harrison Salisbury called Report from a Chinese Village a social classic) and Confessions of a Disloyal European, which the NY Times Book Review chose as "one of ten books of particular excellence and significance in 1968" in its Christmas book issue. But in Sweden he is the author of over 60 volumes of political commentary, art and literary criticism, history, novels, autobiography, poetry and plays, and has also curated exhibitions and regularly does documentaries on whatever he pleases for Swedish TV (recently a 13 part series on the history of political and social caricature, also printed as a coffee table book). Most recent volumes in Sweden are his collected art criticism and a huge art book "Five Years of Freedom," on a period in the 1830s when there was press freedom in France. Myrdal also curated an exhibition on the subject and was recently awarded the coveted honor, Chevalier des arts et des lettres, by the French government.
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