Book review: Vänsterpatriarkens late confessions

For my bourgeois sins, I read Jan Myrdal's new book ”A second grace”. He occupies a special position in the old left, the wax museum, always so willing to explain away all the millions of murders of ordinary people, as happened in the communist dictatorships, especially in Pol pot's Time, and Mao's China.

For this and a few other embarrassing intellectual crime, he learns to be remembered, androm to be removed.

But he is also a significant author. It is not possible to get around, and can be just as difficult to understand as he once had such a commanding position in the Swedish public sphere.

posted reseskildringarna from China and India – which He started when he left the east in the late 50's-can emerge as his principal, it will, perhaps rather his more personal ”jagböcker” and barndomsskildringar that renders him inside.

I think in the first hand on the ”Contemporary confessions of a european intellectual” (1964) and the trilogy ”Childhood” (1982), ”A different world” (1984) and ”noon on the thirteenth” (1989). They have an urgent web composed appropriations snatches the tag directly, a linguistic precision that can compete with the best.

Now is Jan Myrdal nittioett on the nittioandra and single in Varberg. Alone with only a cat in a large house which also houses the library which bears his name and has impressed the 50,000 volumes on the shelves.

His fourth wife, has in the press announced that they separated as friends, with the tragicomic note though that the pair had ”different political positions”. In addition, he held on to die of sepsis in the autumn of 2015.

Time to examine his life thus. Rotate and flip, then peel the onion, are sometimes ”beyond skamgränsen”.

autobiography is thinking He does not serve. He is a free writer with roots in the 1700s and the revolutionary boys who seemed that time had not felt at some stolpiga genregränser. Nice and soulful författaré is a later invention.

And well, thank you, the memories are lit. There will be more privacy than one is accustomed to from Myrdal's side, though he already has written a book with the title ”Gubbsjuka”. The thoughts wanders intensely in solitude in front of the computer in Varberg. All to with: the passions, sveken, settlements, abortion, impotensen, sexdrömmarna and könssjukdomarna.

Not least, he is wrestling självutlämnade with their relationship in May, the woman he had already written a romance novel about. ”People who believe that the feelings will go away is charles dickens”. It is well done.

No details are stored. It felt like he ”pulled out barbed wire by the penis,” writes Myrdal on a tough gonorrhea in the 50's. But He would not be In if not the banal infection was awarded ”life-changing” relevance: the claimed to have come from his prospective third wife, and shut enough of the door to the second marriage.

sometimes, and omtagen is right many people express themselves Myrdal with a sharp concreteness that sparks. Just as often, he is challenging even, and appear as a repetitive rabulist on the wrong track, for example, in the chapter ”waking up horny on her ninetieth”.

If death and old age, he writes avklarnat and important. If the jävliga the loneliness and the humiliation of the end of life at any institution which for many will be too prolonged and painful. Where he thinks not getting. Deliberately suicide can be a wise option.

Why can't even rule over his own death? The should no one else have to do, least of all the social state or the church. Where do I connect me to Myrdal libertarian position.

I have always appreciated his unorthodox bildningsgång. The great love of reading, books and thoughts; distrust of dreary homework, and conventional science. He get sight of a lot of fun in the cultural history of the rear view mirror and parts happily – sometimes magistralt – with the findings in the library.

be to Myrdal on the verge of senseless loyalty with the child he once was. Replays, replays. Here from liguria, once again, the infected relationship to the famous parents, Gunnar and Alva. It has, at least, I had enough of.

self-criticism – and the paradoxes – are not lacking. He cites his youth psychoanalyst Nic Waal: ”You intellectualise everything.” And the former wife in May: ”You will always act out, play up. It is like your letter, they are always written to an audience as well and now you pretend to shoot you and play theater to make me feel bad”.

A historian should find out Jan Myrdal's relation to the real existing communism. There are probably a few keys here. But he beslöjar the text when it burns. Where should he not get a respite.

The big void? The children, the mothers, of course, got to take care of. Vänsterpatriarken had more important things to do.

Read more: ”I have laid out my photo – but no girl's teeth on a 91-year-old”