NONFICTION - Jan. 5, 1992

CHILDHOOD by Jan Myrdal (Lake View Press: $18.95; 182 pp.) . Jan Myrdal’s recollections of his childhood stand in chilling contrast to his sister Sissela Bok’s biography of her mother, Nobel Peace Prize-winner Alva Myrdal. Alva and her husband Gunnar, who won the Nobel Prize in economics, were at the center of Sweden’s intellectual and political elite--but to hear their son and eldest child tell it, life at home was a chilly exercise in detachment; he won not their affection and delight but rather their almost clinical interest. Myrdal’s prose is severe, his style anecdotal, and he cautions those who expect an autobiography grounded in fact and detail that they will be disappointed. This is the memoir of a wounded adult, one who slips back into the miseries of his childhood with rather alarming ease and clarity. He makes blunt accusations: His mother, he says, was aware that he had problems with his vision when he was 6, but did nothing until Jan himself, at 12, sought out a doctor’s counsel. He depicts an eerie domestic landscape where dreams and waking hours overlapped, where a boy learned early to be wary of the very people he should have adored. Myrdal wondered whether he had been adopted, but when he asked his father he got only anger in return. He learned to keep to himself: “Because I knew everything suggested something else, I was careful when I talked with them,” he writes. “You had to choose your words so you were not understood.”