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During the left movement of the 60s and 70s, he was one of the loudest voices in the Swedish public. Jan Myrdal fought with the police officers in the first FNL demonstrations and was at the center of the main left-wing issues of the time: the third world, anti-colonialism, the critique of social democracy as a kind of secret bourgeoisie and the belief in Mao’s China as the good form of communism.
Jan Myrdal is purely political writing has lost its relevance. A book like Rapport från Chinese Village (1963), which at the time was perceived as significant and documentary, can hardly be seen today as anything other than sophisticated literary propaganda: a reporting trip as a guest of the regime, led by the regime and conducted with the interpreters of the regime. A revolutionary idyll painted according to ideological regulations. In the 2000s, such a book could reduce a writer’s career, but in the 1960s it laid the foundation for Myrdal’s reputation as a writer and intellectual.
After defending the Iranian regime’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, expressing his understanding of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and stubbornly refusing to reevaluate the Khmer Rouge genocide regime in Cambodia, Jan Myrdal had lost all sense of political or moral authority in the broader public debate.
That, however, will remain is the fiction writer Jan Myrdal and his unique language: cool, cold and hard as stone. He, as it were, amputates every doubt and objection, leaving a bloody cross-security torso without cracks. It can be completely intoxicating to read.
The set of childhood descriptions beginning in Childhood (1982) belongs to Swedish literary history. The adult author is loyally on the side of the sad boy Jan Myrdal and portrays the parents, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, the intellectual stars of the Social Democrats, as a brutal and oppressive regime. Funkisvillan in Bromma, designed for parents by noted architect Sven Markelius, is a hellish surveillance device with an open floor plan.
Jan Myrdal himself said: with a frenzy that childhood descriptions were not ordinary subjective memories. Somehow they would be seen as objective, historically true. He called the genre “I-books”, which would be something other than bourgeois literary autobiography.
This is, of course, incomprehensible reasoning. But amid the unreasonably self-absorbed depictions of growth, Childhood Suite is at the forefront.
