The debater Myrdal lost authority a long time ago - but the author lives on

During the left-wing movement of the 60s and 70s, he was one of the strongest voices in the Swedish public.

Jan Myrdal fought with the police officers in the first FNL demonstrations and was at the center of the leading 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's 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 today hardly be seen as anything other than literary sophisticated propaganda: a reportage trip as a guest of the regime, led by the regime and carried out with the regime's interpreters.

A revolutionary idyll painted according to the ideological rulebook.

In the 2000s, such a book could lower 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 re-evaluate the Khmer Rouge's genocide regime in Cambodia, Jan Myrdal had lost all sense of political or moral authority in the wider public debate. 

What will remain, however,

is the fiction writer Jan Myrdal and his unique language: fresh, cold and hard as stone.

As if to amputate every doubt and objection, a bloody torso of crack-free cross-security remains.

It can be completely intoxicating to read him. 

The suite of childhood descriptions starting in Childhood (1982) belongs to Swedish literary history.

The adult author stands with total loyalty on the side of the sad child Jan Myrdal and portrays the parents - Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, the intellectual stars of the Social Democrats - as a brutal oppressive regime.

Funkisvillan in Bromma, designed for the parents by the top architect Sven Markelius, is a hellish surveillance device with an open floor plan. 

Jan Myrdal himself said,

with frenzy, that the depictions of childhood were not ordinary subjective memory books.

They would somehow be seen as objective, historically true.

He called the genre "I-books" which would be something else is bourgeois literary autobiography. 

This is, of course, an incomprehensible reasoning.

But among the unreasonably self-absorbed depictions of growing up, the Childhood Suite is in the forefront.