_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [28]
If Lisbeth takes after anyone, it’s Pippi Longstocking, our national heroine conjured up by children’s book author Astrid Lindgren. This delightful and formidable little girl has been a champion of equality between the sexes: she doesn’t depend on anyone, can use a revolver, has sailed the seven seas, and not only can she beat Mighty Adolf, the strongest man in the world … she can lift up her pet horse! But the main thing about Pippi is that she has her own ideas about right and wrong—and she lives by them, no matter what the law or adults say. After one of her adventures, she announces, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a pirate.” One evening toward the end of the 1990s, Stieg and some journalists at TT had fun imagining what all the favorite storybook idols of Swedish children might really have grown up to be. Pippi Longstocking? Lisbeth Salander, perhaps. And what about Kalle Blomkvist (or Bill Bergson, as he’s known in English), the young hero of Astrid Lindgren’s trilogy about an ordinary boy who loves to solve mysteries and even real crimes that baffle the police and other adults? Maybe Mikael Blomkvist. The readers of The Millennium Trilogy may decide for themselves. Actually, the only real Lisbeth Salander in Sweden, who is sixty years old and lives off in a remote village, wrote me to say she was fed up with reporters calling her to ask if she knew Stieg Larsson. She signed off by saying, “If you ever get up this way, come have coffee with me, we’ll have a chat and a laugh!”
THE WOMEN in history who interested Stieg were those who defied all stereotypes of “the weaker sex,” and he mentions some of them on the first page of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest: the Amazons, and the women who disguised themselves as soldiers to fight in the American Civil War, and women who led their people to battle like Boudicca (aka Boadicea), the queen of the Iceni tribe who led a revolt against the Romans in England. On one of the many trips we made to London (especially during the eight years my sister Britt lived there), Stieg took me to Westminster Bridge to show me the statue of Boudicca, one of his favorite heroines.
Erika Berger, the editor in chief of Millennium, was entirely made up. That the position is held by a woman is neither an accident nor a literary artifice; in fact I’d have been astonished if Stieg had done otherwise. Erika Berger is competent and assumes full responsibility for both her colleagues and the finances of the magazine. Her private life is rather unconventional, in that she has a husband and a lover, and she acts on her desires, which does cause her some problems.
For some aspects of Anita Vanger, Stieg drew on my sister Britt. While he was writing the first book, he asked her if, “as” Anita, she would like to live in Guildford, southwest of London, where she lived after she first moved to England from Sweden, but Britt preferred to go north instead, to “a terrace house in the attractive suburb of St. Albans.” Throughout her London years, Britt always lived in apartments heated by gas radiators set into fireplaces, an arrangement Stieg and I knew well. Whenever we arrived at my sister’s place, we’d rush to turn on the heat, relieved to see the temperature rise beyond the 60 degrees Fahrenheit Britt had finally gotten used to!
Sometimes, like Martina Karlgren or Franck Ellis in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, a character in the trilogy mentions scientific or professional journals such as Nature or The New England Journal of Medicine, which Britt read in conjunction with her work in medical research. She often told us about articles she’d found particularly interesting, so Stieg was quite familiar with such publications.
Giving some of his characters real people’s names, and even their professions or personalities, was for Stieg a mark of affection and admiration. We didn’t know the boxer Paolo Roberto personally, but in Sweden he’s a celebrity. Although he was a young delinquent