_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [27]
Finally, among the many places in the trilogy that belonged to Stieg and me, one I particularly cherish is the little cabin at Sandhamn (“Sand Harbor”) where Mikael Blomkvist goes “to read, write, and relax.” Every summer we would rent one of these wooden cottages out in the archipelago. Our dream was to build one just for ourselves, and we wanted it to resemble the one described by Lisbeth Salander: about 325 square feet arranged like a boat’s cabin, with a large window looking out over the water and a big kitchen table where both of us could write.
The Characters
IN THE Millennium Trilogy some real people appear, so to speak, under their own names, because Stieg wanted to honor them in this way. Other people provided real-life details that inspired Stieg when he created his fictional characters out of this and that. And some readers simply think they recognize real people—even themselves—in characters who are wholly imaginary. A plastic surgeon wrote me, for example, that he was convinced he’d been the model for the doctor who enlarges Lisbeth Salander’s breasts in The Girl Who Played with Fire!
MIKAEL BLOMKVIST is not Stieg Larsson. Like Stieg, he’s constantly drinking coffee, smoking, and working like a fiend, but the resemblance basically stops there. On the other hand, though, Blomkvist does clearly embody the figure of the celebrated all-around journalist Stieg would have liked to be, and this character is a spokesperson for many of Stieg’s opinions and causes. Blomkvist is also, like his creator, an incorrigible and incorruptible fighter for justice.
IS LISBETH Salander a feminine double for Stieg? The two share the same lousy eating habits, at least, given their addiction to frozen pizzas and fast-food sandwiches. A champion hacker, a prodigy of computer and investigative skills, Lisbeth is blessed with a photographic memory that allows her to memorize complex texts, such as a treatise on spherical astronomy, with dazzling speed. I’ve already touched on Stieg’s incredible memory, his iconoclastic culture, and his inexhaustible hunger for reading about the most varied subjects. Some of the elements in the hacker circles in which Lisbeth moves may come, for example, from The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling, but we also had plenty of Superman and Spider-Man comics around the house, featuring superheroes with extraordinary powers for whom Lisbeth could serve as a little sister. As for her mania for caution and secrecy, Stieg was the same way—but so was everyone at Searchlight and Expo, because that wariness came with the territory.
IN THE Girl Who Played with Fire, Lisbeth visits her former guardian Holger Palmgren in a rehabilitation home, where they play a rather complicated game of chess, a variant of one of Lasker’s most famous games. My brother Bjorn has a large chess library, including several studies of a few classic games by Emanuel Lasker, the famous German mathematician and chess champion. From the moment they met in the 1970s, Stieg and my brother liked to play chess with each other. Stieg usually lost, but since he wasn’t the type to give up, he never refused a rematch. When he left for Africa in 1977, he specified in an unwitnessed will—about which I’ll have more to say later—that if he did not return, he wished my brother to inherit all his science fiction books.
Many people think they “recognize” Lisbeth Salander. Some insist she was a journalist who worked at Expo. As for Stieg’s brother Joakim, he claims she’s based on his own daughter, with whom Stieg allegedly communicated by email. Joakim was careful