12 Going On 13 - Hardcover

Myrdal, Jan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1884468012 ISBN 13: 9781884468018

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2011

Synopsis

"I am my own person now. I looked Alva right in the eye and said I didn't belong to their family any more, I wasn't a part of it any more. Again they sacrifice us to their political ambitions and talk about their noble principles."
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.
Jan Myrdal is twelve going on thirteen. It is 1939, the war in Europe has begun. The war between Jan and his parents continues.
In this autobiographical novel about childhood, Jan Myrdal recreates the look and feel of New York and Stockholm at a turning point in his life and the world's, the outbreak of World War II. He despairs as his parents return him to Sweden, prisoner of a family torn apart by culture, politics and ambition.
Through an uncanny entry into a child's language and experience, Myrdal relives his shame and anger, his awakening sexuality, his escape into an elaborate fantasy system, and his passion for knowing the world—its people, its machines, its politics.
The story is told without sentimentality or nostalgia, with the language and feeling of a boy open to the sweet and bitter tastes of childhood.
The first of Myrdal's autobiographies about his early years, Childhood, was almost suppressed before it became a best-seller; the next, Another World, won the Grand Prize for the Novel; and Twelve Going on Thirteen won the Esselte Prize for Literature, with 100,000 copies given free to schoolchildren in Sweden. The outspoken critic of "the Swedish model" has become part of the curriculum.
Jan Myrdal is the author of more than 60 books. The titles best known to English readers are Report from a Chinese Village," called "a social classic" by Harrison Salisbury, and the Sixties classic, Confessions of a Disloyal European. One of Sweden's leading intellectuals, he has written political and social commentary, art and literary criticism, novels, poetry, and plays. He has also curated exhibitions, made feature films and TV documentaries, and has edited scholarly editions of Balzac, Diderot and Strindberg. He maintains a controversial presence in Swedish political and cultural life through frequent TV and newspaper commentaries.

About this title

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Swedish

From Publishers Weekly

In this third novel (after Childhood and Another World) based on his own upbringing, Swedish novelist, columnist and political analyst Myrdal once again portrays his Nobel laureate parents (his father for economics, his mother for peace)?sociologists Gunnar and Alva Myrdal?as cruel, smug hypocrites. Famed architects of Sweden's progressive social policies, Gunnar and Alva, by their son's acid account, used constant ridicule, authoritarian control, double-binds, sadistic humiliations and a rigidly behaviorist system of punishments to mold him and sabotage his sense of self. Originally published in Sweden in 1989, this searing self-portrait, winner of that country's Esselte Prize for Literature, is told from the point of view of a rebellious, wounded preadolescent. It opens in New York City in 1940, where 12-year-old Jan had been attending school, then moves to Sweden, where his parents leave him with his aunt and uncle while they travel. Hitler's invading armies are taking over Europe, and Jan, though embroiled in his own private domestic hell, castigates the hypocrisy of pious Swedes who ring churchbells on Sundays yet refuse to speak out against the Nazis or to take up arms. There are also flashbacks to the boy's visits with relatives in Minnesota, meshed with sexual fantasies and skeptical questioning of organized religion. Myrdal's fiercely honest account of how he resisted and overcame parental psychological abuse has the emotional intensity of a Strindberg play.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1884468012
• ISBN 13: 9781884468018
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 198