_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [2]
Because of my work as an architect, I was not with Stieg when he died but in the province of Dalarna, in central Sweden. Would it have made any difference if I had been there? I’ll never know, obviously, but I like to believe so. Whenever we were together, that communion affected our lives profoundly.
“MILLENNIUM STIEG,” the author of best-selling crime thrillers, was born in July 2005 with the publication of the first novel in his trilogy. Since then there have been feature films and TV movies.
And yet, the trilogy is only one episode in Stieg’s journey through this world, and it certainly isn’t his life’s work.
The Stieg of the “Millennium industry” doesn’t interest me.
The one I care about is my life partner and my ally in everything. The man I loved deeply, with whom I went through life for thirty-two years. An affectionate man, generous, funny, enthusiastic, committed…. The journalist, the feminist, the militant. The love of my life.
When I lost him, a huge part of me was lost with him.
THAT STIEG was born on August 15, 1954….
Early Days
IN THE Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the novel that opens The Millennium Trilogy, Mikael Blomkvist discovers a photo taken during the Children’s Day Parade in Hedeby, the oldest neighborhood in the small town of Hedestad, on the day Harriet Vanger disappeared. Seeking information about that day to help him understand what might have frightened the teenager away, he hunts for the tourist couple who photographed the parade forty years earlier. His research takes him into northern Sweden, first to Norsjo, then to Bjursele, in Vasterbotten County. Why there? For most Swedes, those are godforsaken places at the back of beyond, but Stieg knew them well. It was there that he went as a baby in 1955 to live with his maternal grandparents. His father and mother, Erland Larsson and Vivianne Bostrom, were too young to bring him up properly, and they left to live 600 miles away in the south. In 1957 they moved again to Umea (pronounced Umio), a small city 125 miles southeast of Norsjo.
Writing about Norsjo and Bjursele was Stieg’s way of paying homage to the small community of people there who gave him the best moments of his youth. And a way of thanking them for the values they instilled in him.
STIEG LIVED with his grandparents in a small wooden house on the edge of a forest. Their home had a kitchen and one other room, without water, electricity, or an indoor toilet. This kind of house is typical of the Swedish countryside and its family farms, and in those days, when the next generation took over the farm, the old folks would “retire” to such a place. The walls of Stieg’s grandparents’ house were poorly insulated, and the joints between the planks were probably crammed with sawdust in the old style. The kitchen woodstove on which his grandmother cooked the meals was the only source of heat. In the winter, the temperature outside could drop to as low as -35 degrees Celsius, with—at most—thirty minutes of daylight, and Stieg used to ski cross-country to the village school in the moonlight. Prompted by his natural curiosity, he tirelessly explored the surrounding forests, lakes, and trails, hoping to meet other people and catch glimpses of animals, too. Life was tough where he lived, so it took plenty of ingenuity to survive, but such an environment breeds hardy individuals, self-reliant, resourceful, generous folks who can be counted on in a pinch. Like Stieg.
According to Stieg, his maternal grandfather, Severin, was an anti-Nazi communist who was imprisoned in an internment camp during World War II. After the war, such militants were not exactly welcomed back into society. Even at the time, people didn’t want to talk about this period in Swedish history,