_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [26]
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 Sodermalm district.
Actually, so many of Stieg’s characters live and work in Sodermalm that this large island, one of the most densely populated districts of the capital, becomes a character in its own right, a part of central Stockholm that is also central to the plot of The Millennium Trilogy. Connected on its northern rim to Gamla Stan (the Old Town) by Slussen, a transportation grid with a lock between the Baltic Sea and Lake Malaren, “Soder” is also linked by bridges to big Kungsholmen to the northwest, little Reimersholme to the west—in fact to a whole ring of islands large and small. In the seventeenth century, rich people began building summer homes in rural, agricultural Sodermalm, and working-class housing was built, such as the red cottages still seen today in the northeast of the island. Urbanization proceeded apace in the twentieth century, but as often happens, the by now largely working-class district eventually became home to students, bohemians, and creative souls of all types, and Sodermalm currently offers many cultural (and countercultural) amenities. True to form, gentrification brought a new cachet to Soder—and Lisbeth Salander to her apartment at 9 Fiskargatan, thanks to that article in my files.
My documentation also inspired the Skanska stock-options affair at the beginning of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the pension scandal at ABB, which Mikael Blomkvist and Robert Lindberg discuss when they meet on the wharf on Arholma, the northernmost island in the Stockholm archipelago. It’s after this unfortunate conversation that Blomkvist begins investigating Wennerstrom and winds up convicted of defamation.
Stieg and I knew all of the cafes that appear in The Millennium Trilogy. We used to meet in some of them after work, as we did at the Kafe Anna in Kungsholmen, where Blomkvist hears on the radio that Wennerstrom has won his libel case. We liked to visit other cafes on the spur of the moment, like the Giffy and the Java on one of Sodermalm’s main streets, Hornsgatan, perhaps after one of our art gallery expeditions on the Hornsgatan “hill.” Expo‘s informal headquarters were the Kaffebar right downstairs in the same building, where Blomkvist learns—again, on the radio—that the man who tried to murder Lisbeth has himself been murdered. The Kaffebar still serves a marvelous little sandwich made with cheese from Vasterbotten County, where