Stieg Larsson, My Friend - Kurdo Baksi [38]
He didn’t even try to defend himself.
“I know. It’s my fault. But the fact is I’m always too stressed to do anything about it.”
“It’s only a matter of time before the media catch on.”
He nodded dejectedly.
“I know, I know.”
He suddenly looked depressed. That had not been my intention. I was worried, I really was, and I knew the explanation he gave was true. When would he have had time to sort out the gender balance at Expo? How many hours are there in a day?
As usual, our arguments had come up against a snag. Yet again we had fought a battle in the office, dealt with important questions that needed sorting out, only to find that shortly thereafter we were back to square one.
The basement windows were just as impenetrably black as before. There was still some time to go before dawn. Nothing outside could be seen clearly from where we were sitting. The world was deaf, vague, unclear and uncertain.
If the night was a rose, it had just scratched us with one of its sharp thorns.
9
The anti-racist as crime novelist
By the time Stieg reached the age of thirty-six, he could begin to call himself an author. Naturally, it never occurred to him to tell anybody else that, but the fact is that for the last fourteen years of his life he was involved in ten different book projects, usually as editor, but sometimes as author. The only non-fiction to appear under his own name is Överleva deadline – Handbok för hotade journalister (Surviving the Deadlines – A Handbook for Threatened Journalists), published in 2000 by the Swedish Journalists’ Union. The recurring theme in all his technical books is racism, and half of those are about the xenophobic Sweden Democrats.
Stieg’s first book was Extremhögern (The Extreme Right), a factual study which has become a classic. He wrote it in the spring of 1991 together with the journalist Anna-Lena Lodenius. It was an extremely ambitious survey, 370 pages in length, of organized racism: nothing like it had ever been published in Sweden before. The book comprises twenty chapters, divided into three parts. Geographically it stretches from Sweden to the U.S., and covers the time from the First World War to the present day.
Cooperation between the two authors was not always smooth. Their attitudes towards their subject matter were too different. Stieg refused to compromise and adopt a neutral approach to neo-Nazis, racists and xenophobes. He kept on using words like madmen, psychopaths, blockheads and idiots. While the writing was in progress, the warrior within him sprang into life once more, and he strode forth looking for trouble. Anna-Lena has told me how difficult it was to work with Stieg. She felt that what these individuals did was more than sufficient to show what kind of people they were, but Stieg wanted to use highly critical or disparaging language to describe intolerant persons and groups. It eventually became impossible for him and Anna-Lena to work together, and after writing the joint foreword to the second edition, their collaboration came to an end.
I have to say that I understand how Stieg could be difficult to work with while writing. Presumably the only way of completing the book was to allow him to use his own vocabulary. Mind you, now – eighteen years later – it strikes me that he and Anna-Lena Lodenius complemented each other perfectly. Stieg had greater insight into the racist movements and an impressively extensive network. There was no doubt about his expertise when it came to racism. The archive he compiled so laboriously was unique. On the other hand, Anna-Lena was in total command of the full range of journalistic skills.
The first part of Extremhögern is devoted to the racist and neo-Nazi movements that expanded in Sweden during the 1980s. Part Two, “The International Scene”, depicts the growth of racism in Italy, Great Britain, the U.S., France, Germany, Denmark and Norway, and of right-wing extremism