Opinion Millennium man
The creation of Stieg Larsson,posthumously.
A readers search for an author a slapdash journey through biographies,memoirs and journals can be one of the most confounding pursuits in the books world. It often happens after the quiet discovery of a book or the loud entry of a bestseller,when you are left seeking out not only the odds and ends of an authors writings,but also the odds and ends of the authors life. Thats when you begin to fetishise the purple heather in the moors of the Brontës and the mangosteen tree under which Vaikom Muhammad Basheer stretched his legs and listened to Saigal. Thats the great,desperate search for the authorly shadow,for anything that bears some approximation to the writers life as it was. But theres something particularly disconcerting when it comes to Stieg Larsson,the author of a contemporary bestseller whose persona is being entirely created posthumously by others.
This might be true of every author who has found posthumous success,from Currer Bell to Kafka,but in Larssons case,you see the work in progress,the potions flowing out of the phials in Frankensteins laboratory. In the absence of Larssons diaries or notebooks so far,this is the beginning of a curious reconstruction of a popular writer.
The readers of Larssons novels came in much after the very end. For Larsson,a journalist-activist little known outside Sweden,died in Stockholm in November 2004,at the age of 50,a few months after he had handed over the manuscript of The Millennium trilogy to the publisher. Over the next few years,the crime thrillers became a publishing phenomenon,with more than 40 million copies sold worldwide. Movies have been and are being made: if we collectively had to tinker with our image of the tattooed and pierced heroine of the novels,Lisbeth Salander,to accept Noomi Rapace in the Swedish film,we may have to do a lot more to fit muscled Daniel Craig in the role of journalist Mikael Blomkvist in the David Fincher movie that releases in December. But all this while,for the most part,the writer who created a dark,predatory,violent Sweden,remained hidden. He was reduced to the photo of a boyish,spectacled Larsson on the jacket and the terse bio of the crusading author and liberal journalist who did not live to enjoy the phenomenon that his work has become.
Now Stieg is rising. Books are coming out of Sweden: after Stieg My Friend by journalist Kurdo Baksi,comes Stieg & Me by his companion of 32 years,Eva Gabrielsson. They met in the autumn of 1972,as youngsters opposed to the Vietnam War,putting up posters,raising funds and arguing how,indeed,could an imperial war like that have happened.
She also tells you how he began writing the trilogy,during an island vacation in 2002. He tells her,I was just thinking about the piece I wrote in 1997 about an old man who receives a flower in the mail every Christmas. We are never told if that was a news report or a story,but soon,she says,he gets down to it,writing unconnected sequences and finally stitching them together. He had planned 10 books in all,she says,and the fourth volume was found in his computer after his death. About 200 pages long and incomplete,its working title is The Vengeance of God.
Both Gabrielsson and Baksi know their books gain relevance from the stupendous success of the Millennium novels. And they try to draw tenuous parallels between Larsson and the characters in the book: both Blomkvist and Larsson loved coffee,they say,but Larsson was perhaps more like Lisbeth,with her prodigious memory,distrust for authorities,reluctance to talk about the past and addiction to frozen pizzas and fast-food sandwiches. Gabrielsson even unrolls the atlas of Larssons novels and does some pinpointing: Lisbeth holidayed in Grenada,Larsson loved the island. But at the same time,both Gabrielsson and Baksi want to show him as more than a best-selling crime novelist,and provide images of a feminist,anti-racist Larsson who constantly received threats from the neo-Nazis.
Gabrielssons evident proprietariness over Larsson partly stems from her feud with Stiegs father and brother,who took control of his estate,denying her the rights. She is keen to reveal the links in the novels and the novelists life,and stake her claim on both: here Larsson becomes a roman à clef that she is privileged to make sense of. Yet,there is disdain for the Millennium Stieg,the phenomenon that he has become,and Gabrielsson drives the last nail for Larssons fans: Those who see Stieg solely as an author of crime fiction have never truly known him. In their eagerness to preserve Stieg as a fringe crusader,Gabrielsson and Baksi deny the reader the pleasure of being let in on Larsson the author. In their efforts to stare down the entertainment industry growing around him,outside their control,they even consider below par the readers sheer delight in it and in the knowledge she has of him as a crime writer. The art of fiction too gets short shrift: Nothing was made up, declares Gabrielsson.
Until a Larsson bio comes owning the crime writer,his trilogy would continue to be the ultimate medium to connect with him.
charmy.harikrishnan@expressindia.com
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