"There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me (9 page)

BOOK: "There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me
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What more beautiful homage could Stieg pay to women than to make them heroines in a feminist crime novel? And to show them as he saw them: brave, free, strong enough to change their world and refuse to be victims. As for the murderers, Stieg’s indictment of them in the trilogy is encoded in verses from the Bible.

At the Heart of the Bible
 

THE REMARKABLE
atmosphere Stieg created in
The Millennium Trilogy
, with its characteristic moral rigor and wealth of biblical references, is the one that permeated our early years in Västerbotten County. It’s an atmosphere far removed from that of classic crime novels, but one favored by our great writers, such as Per Olov Enquist, the author of
The Royal Physician’s Visit
, or Torgny Lindgren, who wrote
The Way of a Serpent
. Both of these men, like Stieg, came from that isolated region in northern Sweden.

Historically speaking, the rest of the country had been under the authority of the Lutheran Church since the sixteenth century, but in the North, dissident and extremely austere Protestant movements sprang up in the nineteenth
century, notably the Religious Awakening led by the radical pastor Lars Levi Laestadius. The mission of such movements was to save the populace—mainly workers and peasants—from the ravages of alcoholism. Music and dancing were forbidden, women were not allowed to wear makeup, and so on. These breakaway movements mostly disappeared by the mid-twentieth century, after the advent of the industrial society and massive urbanization.

The world of my childhood was peopled by dissident, conservative country folk who belonged to SEM (the Swedish Evangelical Mission), while Stieg’s youth was instead dominated by communist and Social Democratic workers, but all of these people—obstinate, loyal, honest, with a deep sense of morality—were much alike.

Founded in 1856, SEM is a movement dedicated to the renewal of faith within the Lutheran Church. One of its founders, the great lay preacher and author Carl Olof Rosenius, was born in Anäset in Västerbotten County, where my paternal grandmother grew up. One of SEM’s articles of faith is that every Christian must live in a direct relationship with God, taking full responsibility for his or her actions—a relationship that begins, of course, in daily life. Since a personal reading of the Bible is one of the essential pillars of religious observance, the movement has always had a strong focus on literacy and education, and one of its major concerns has been the dissemination of religious texts. In 1868, the door-to-door salesmen who handled that task received the authorization to preach, and their influence is still felt today in the region where Stieg and I grew up, which is
sometimes called the Bible Belt, like its namesake in the United States. SEM collected money to provide for the work of its preachers and missionaries in Africa and Asia, so even as a child, I was aware of our responsibility toward these continents.

Every village had its small congregation houses where the villagers gathered. Because of the great distances to be traveled, however, people out in the countryside could not attend church regularly, so their pastors and lay preachers, who were sometimes their neighbors, would visit them. And if there was only one book in the house, it was the Bible. I think that even Stieg’s communist grandparents had one. The Bible had been a nurturing presence in their childhood, as it was in the lives of every Swedish citizen, because until 1996, everyone was automatically born a Lutheran in Sweden, where church and state were not separated until 2000.

Life was hard in the North, and not just when a family was visited by illness or death; the Bible brought courage and comfort to people who struggled daily to survive in the fields, forests, and the few factories there. For Stieg and me, the Bible was not so much the New Testament, the Jesus who asks us to turn the other cheek, but the formidable Old Testament, blunt and violent, like the age-old way of life up in our territory. Without officials or judges, and with mostly itinerant pastors, society had no fixed hierarchy, so people had to shape rules for themselves in order to survive together. That was the context in which Stieg and I were raised by our grandparents, who lived by the values of
older times, and this upbringing gave us a strong moral compass, a faculty doubtless more developed in us than it is in most people of our generation. Some things are done and others are not. Period.

We were not believers, but when we traveled we always visited churches and cemeteries. I loved—and still do—to light candles in memory of the loved ones I have lost.

In our apartment in Stockholm, we each had a Bible that, like the Koran, was always somewhere among our clutter of books. Stieg used his, of course, to help him write about the murders of the young women in the first volume of the trilogy: taking inspiration from real police reports, he then culled from the Bible the verses he could use to create an enigma.

The Duty of Vengeance
 

STIEG WAS
a generous man, loyal, warmhearted, and fundamentally kind. But he could also be completely the opposite. Whenever someone treated him or anyone close to him badly, it was “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” He never forgave such an affront, and made no bones about it. “To exact revenge for yourself or your friends,” he used to say, “is not only a right, it’s an absolute duty.” Even if he sometimes had to wait for years, Stieg always paid people back.

In the first volume of the trilogy, Henrik Vanger speaks for Stieg when he tells Mikael Blomkvist, “I’ve had many enemies over the years. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s never get in a fight you’re sure to lose. On the other hand,
never let anyone who has insulted you get away with it. Bide your time and strike back when you’re in a position of strength—even if you no longer need to strike back.” In the third book,
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
, Mikael explains to Anders Jonasson, the doctor who takes care of Lisbeth Salander, that he must help his young patient even if it’s illegal to do so, because he may in good conscience break the law to obey
a higher morality
. For Stieg, Lisbeth was the ideal incarnation of the code of ethics that requires us to act according to our convictions. She is a kind of biblical archangel, the instrument of
The Vengeance of God
, the working title of the fourth volume in
The Millennium Trilogy
.

When he was a boy in Umeå, Stieg got into fights everywhere and often. One day a boy broke one of his front teeth, so Stieg had to have a gold false tooth implanted in his jaw. Long afterward, he lay in wait for his attacker one night and took him by surprise. Stieg never had another problem with him—or anyone else. Yes, revenge is indeed a dish best eaten cold.

This dilemma between morality and action is in fact what drives the plot in
The Millennium Trilogy
. Individuals change the world and their fellow human beings for better or for worse, but each of us acts according to his or her own sense of morality, which is why everything comes down in the end to personal responsibility.

The trilogy allowed Stieg to denounce everyone he loathed for their cowardice, their irresponsibility, and their opportunism: couch-potato activists, sunny-day warriors, fair-weather skippers who pick and choose their causes;
false friends who used him to advance their own careers; unscrupulous company heads and shareholders who wangle themselves huge bonuses.… Seen in this light, Stieg couldn’t have had any better therapy for what ailed his soul than writing his novels.

Addresses in
The Millennium Trilogy
 

IN
THE
Girl Who Played with Fire
, Stieg describes what Erika Berger’s husband, Lars Beckman, has been doing for the previous six months. An art historian and a successful author, Beckman has been “working on a book about the artistic decoration of buildings and its influences, and why people felt a sense of well-being in some buildings but not in others. The book had begun to develop into an attack on functionalism.” With those words Stieg has also summarized the theme of my book on Per Olof Hallman, an architect and urbanist who died in 1941. Stockholm was built on fourteen islands connected by bridges, and Hallman planned residential communities there that accentuated the capital’s distinctive greenery, islet rocks,
and culturally distinctive houses offering views of the water. Hallman paid particular attention to the
human habitat
through the integration of green spaces, for example, and playgrounds, or even works of art. For Hallman, the goals of architecture and urbanism were to bring people serenity and joie de vivre, for he felt that the environment in which they lived could either strengthen or stress them.

I had begun writing my book in 1997 but was obliged to set it aside when the Swedish government hired me to join a study on the feasibility of constructing affordable quality housing. In 2002, however, I decided to become a part-time consultant so that I could concentrate on my research, which involved spending a great deal of time studying documents in libraries, archives, and stores specializing in old books. Every evening, when Stieg came home and dumped his backpack in the hall, he would always call out, “Hey there! Anybody home?” Then he would head straight for the settee where I sat working and ask his other eternal questions: “What did you find out today? Is there any coffee?” He’d settle in next to me, asking lots of questions and listening closely to my replies.

Since Stieg didn’t have time to read each new version of my book, I discussed the text with him regularly. On Saturdays I’d take him on lengthy walks through the “Hallman zones” I was writing about. As a research shortcut for the trilogy (and to give a little nod to my work), he’d asked me if he could use the places I was showing him so that his characters could live in neighborhoods that matched
their personalities. That’s why Dag Svensson and Mia Bergman—an investigative reporter and a grad student—live in the garden village Enskede, at 8B Björneborgsvägen Street, while Cortez, a reporter for
Millennium
, is on bohemian Alhelgonagatan, in Helgalunden, a neighborhood on Södermalm. And when the trilogy opens, Lisbeth Salander’s place is on working-class Lundagatan.

However, Stieg wanted Mikael Blomkvist’s apartment to be in the oldest part of Södermalm, not in those Hallman zones. We investigated numerous addresses before finding the right one. Bellmansgatan offered several possibilities, one of which was the Laurinska building, at Nos. 4–6. Since its construction in 1891, many artists had lived in this large red-brick apartment house with its spectacular view over the Riddarfjärden, a bay of Lake Mälaren in central Stockholm, but it was too luxurious for Mikael, who could not have afforded to buy anything there. We next seriously considered what looked to us like the ideal apartment building, with a small view of the bay, but it didn’t have enough exits to support the moment in the trilogy when three different groups can all keep Blomkvist under surveillance at the same time. Stieg was disappointed about that, but I told him it wasn’t important: “We’ll put an imaginary door there”—I pointed to the place—“and give the building a fictitious number. That way, the address will fit the plot.”

Stieg’s face lit up. “Yes, that’s what we’ll do!” But somehow that made-up number disappeared in the published version of the surveillance episode, which takes place in
the third volume—and Stieg never had time to review any proofs except those for the first book.

At the beginning of
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
, Mikael Blomkvist tells how he renovated his apartment himself and hid the worst patches of wall behind two watercolors by Emanuel Bernstone. I’ve always been very fond of that artist’s oeuvre, and at a time when he was completely unknown I bought one of his works, a picture of a red-tailed bird, with my small inheritance from my grandmother. And I was able to buy the second painting, a seagull, with the money left to me by my mother. Both watercolors are strong yet delicate “portraits” of shorebirds, and they have a great serenity. They still hang in the home I shared with Stieg.

For my book on Hallman, I had a lengthy interview with his daughter, who was ninety-six years old at the time. She told me that her father had often gone sailing with Anders Zorn, one of Sweden’s foremost painters, and Albert Engström, a prominent Swedish cartoonist and humor writer. The three of them used to drink so much beer that the wharf in front of Hallman’s summer home on Skarpö island became littered with empties, and the ferry had trouble unloading its passengers—an anecdote that found its way into the first volume of the trilogy, when Fredrik Vanger and his wife Ulrika go boating with the two artists.

Stieg was so enthusiastic about my Hallman book that he kept telling me confidently, “You’ll see, this book is going to change your life.” The irony is that it wasn’t my book that turned my life upside down, but
The Millennium Trilogy
.

When Lisbeth Salander returns from Grenada at the beginning of the second novel and looks for an apartment, she has plenty of money but still has trouble finding what she wants. Stieg also spent some time looking for that apartment. Actually, I was the one who found it … in my research files. At the time I was working at Skanska, the largest construction company in Sweden, so I was naturally interested in everything that concerned the firm. I gathered information about both its construction activities and its chairman of the board, Percy Barnevik, whose enormous pension payouts, accumulated thanks to all of the top executive positions he’d held during his career, had been made public in the media—a revelation I found worrisome both as a citizen and as a salaried employee. When Barnevik sold his apartment on Fiskargatan, I’d filed away a relevant newspaper article that included a floor plan of the place. That’s how Lisbeth moved into her lovely apartment on Fiskargatan, near Mosebacke, an area with many cultural venues in the upscale Södermalm district.

BOOK: "There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me
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