_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [59]
In April 2010, my lawyer offered a compromise: I would have the right to manage “the other texts,” meaning everything but The Millennium Trilogy. And we waited for an answer.
IN MAY 2010, a book I’d written with Gunnar von Sydow was published: Sambo: ensammare an du tror (Concubine: More Alone Than You Think). In January 2008, I’d begun to wonder if my predicament might be more common than I thought: cohabitation without benefit of marriage is widespread in Sweden, so many people must have been in my position, and in the course of my research I naturally discovered many men and women who were my companions in misfortune. My coauthor and I found out something astonishing, however: our most solid arguing point—the significant number of couples involved—vanished in a flash! As it turns out, we are all only a minority for the government, since the National Swedish Institute of Statistics only counts couples who have children together. Everyone else is classified as “single.”*
SIX weeks after our compromise offer was made, Joakim and Erland Larsson replied simultaneously, via a press release and an email to my lawyer, that they were breaking off negotiations with me.
FIAT JUSTITIA, pereat mundus. Let justice be done, though all the world perish.
* Sweden is one of the first countries to have tried to regulate the situation of unmarried partners by passing a law of minimal protection for the “weakest” partner: division of the home in 1973, and of community property in 1987. In 2003, these rights were extended to homosexual couples living together.
Today this law is clearly most useful to couples who separate. When one partner dies intestate, the surviving partner falls into a legal black hole—unlike the situation faced by a married couple, where the survivor inherits automatically unless a will stipulates otherwise. So, when two people live together without being married or having children and one partner dies intestate, the legal problems of inheritance are worked out amicably.
Or not. In France, for example, ever since 1999 a pacte civil de solidarite, a legal form of civil union, has granted inheritance rights to the surviving partner if there is a will to this effect, or if a declaration was made when the PACS was registered stipulating that all property acquired after the date of the PACS would be held in common. (Sambo: ensammare an du tror, Eva Gabrielsson and Gunnar von Sydow, Blue Publishing, 2010.)
supporteva.com
EARLY IN April 2009, my lawyer received an unexpected request from a former journalist, Jan M. Moberg (at the time the director general of the Norwegian media group Edda Media), and his lawyer.
Jan M. Moberg had just seen a rebroadcast of “The Millennium Millions,” a special report on Swedish television on how Stieg’s father and brother had come by his estate. During that program, the Larssons had mentioned that one of their ideas for “solving the problem” had been that I should marry Stieg’s father.
Jan M. Moberg and two of his friends, roused to indignation, wanted to launch a website—www.supporteva.com—that would bring me some moral and financial support. Calling themselves the Three Musketeers of Drammen, they saw their creation of this site as an application of the same philosophy of action and justice that animates the trilogy. Their objective was to collect money and open an account for me on the Internet, administered by their lawyer in Norway. I was pleasantly surprised by their professionalism, and my lawyer gave me the go-ahead to accept their offer.
THESE NORWEGIANS seem to have a particularly delightful sense of humor. The website, which was launched within three weeks and translated into several languages, invites Internauts to contribute a sum commensurate with the number of Stieg’s novels they have read and their degree of outrage over my predicament. On the Comments page, messages of encouragement come in from around the world, and I’ve received as many