Stieg Larsson, My Friend - Kurdo Baksi [0]
MY FRIEND
KURDO BAKSI
STIEG LARSSON,
MY FRIEND
Translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson
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Published in Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2010.
Simultaneously published in Sweden as Min vän Stieg Larsson by Norstedts, Stockholm,
and in Great Britain as Stieg Larsson, My Friend by MacLehose Press,
an imprint of Quercus, 21 Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2NS.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Copyright © Kurdo Baksi, 2010
English translation copyright © Laurie Thompson, 2010
“Late Fragment” from All of Us: Collected Poems by Raymond Carver, published by
The Harvill Press and reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
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ISBN: 978-0-670-06536-3
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CONTENTS
1 The end and a beginning
2 The first conversation
3 Expo – blowing the whistle on extremism
4 Stieg as colleague and journalist
5 Living under threat
6 The infiltrator
7 The sleepless warrior
8 The feminist compromise
9 The anti-racist as crime novelist
10 Successes and setbacks
11 Farewell
Afterword
1
The end and a beginning
Stieg Larsson’s funeral took place on Friday, 10 December, 2004, in the Chapel of the Holy Cross at Forest Cemetery in southern Stockholm. The chapel was packed with relatives, friends and acquaintances. We filed past the coffin to pay our respects. Most of us whispered a final message as we walked slowly past the bier.
On the back of the order of service was a poem by Raymond Carver, “Late Fragment”, from the collection he completed shortly before his death:
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
When Carver was asked how he wanted to be remembered, he replied, “I can think of nothing better than to have been called an author.” Not many of the congregation in the chapel that afternoon would have realized that the same applied to Stieg. That he would be remembered as the author of one of the biggest, least expected publishing successes of modern times. For most of us he was a tireless hero in the fight against racism – there was no battle for democracy and equality that he was unwilling to take part in. He was aware that there was a high price attached to doing so, but it was a price he was prepared to pay. The constant