_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [61]
In August 2005, Per-Erik Nilsson submitted an offer to the Larssons and to Norstedts in which he asked that I be given control of the moral rights to Stieg’s work. That way I would have been able to work legally on his texts and finish the fourth book, which I am capable of doing. My lawyer felt that this prospect would inspire the Larssons to find a solution to our impasse.
The Larssons said no.
It should be made clear here that nothing in Swedish inheritance law obliges anyone to inherit a legacy. No one is prevented from giving away all or part of an inheritance. The law also allows the moral rights to an author’s oeuvre to be transferred to someone else.
Stieg’s and my situation—and that of many other couples I mention in my book on unmarried partners, where the surviving companion loses everything after the other one dies—shows that these archaic laws must change, because they treat intellectual creations as if they were plots of land to be added to the relatives’ nearby farmland. When one unmarried partner dies, the other is abruptly stripped of all the couple has built up together, and is thereby prevented from developing their joint creation. And when this legacy is handed over to people who have had nothing to do with it, this is not only immoral but also detrimental to the creative elements in society, since it’s the passive who win and the active who lose. Which means that society stagnates. This unfair situation, publicized through my case, has led many people in Sweden to make their domestic union legally safer, sometimes through marriage.
WITHOUT THE support of our true friends—who do not camp out on TV soundstages, trotting out apocryphal memories and bizarre stories about Stieg for the media or in books—I would never have made it through these last years. This book is also my thanks to them.
Today I’m still fighting to control the literary rights to The Millennium Trilogy and all of Stieg’s political writing. I’m fighting for him, for me, for us.
I do not want his name to be an industry or a brand. The way things are going, what’s to stop me from one day seeing his name on a bottle of beer, a packet of coffee, or a car? I don’t want his struggles and ideals to be sullied and exploited. I know how he would react in every situation I’m facing today: he would fight.
Like Stieg, that’s what I must do.
On the evening of Stieg’s burial, I wrote that I wanted “to survive another year.” A few months later, on the anniversary of his death, I hoped “to learn how to live again.” Today, the words I calmly write are … “to live.” My family, my work, my commitments, my friends: they are what lets me live each and every day.
For Stieg. Because he would ask that of me, the way he did in his farewell letter before he set out for Africa in 1977 when he was twenty-two.
So for me, for us, and because that’s the way we are, I will keep going.
Acknowledgments
Marie-Francoise Colombani would like to thank: Eva Gabrielsson, for her trust
Regis Boyer, specialist in Scandinavian literature and civilization, and Gunnar Lund, the Swedish ambassador to France, for their valuable assistance
H. Poussin, for his support and ornithological expertise Michelle Fitoussi, an early and devoted fan of
The Millennium Trilogy, for her knowledge of building construction and Bruno Lafforgue for his patience.
About Seven Stories Press
SEVEN STORIES PRESS is an independent book publisher based in New York City. We publish works of the imagination by such writers as Nelson Algren, Russell Banks, Octavia E. Butler, Ani DiFranco, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Coco Fusco, Barry Gifford, Hwang Sok-yong, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including the Boston Women’s Health Collective, Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Human Rights Watch, Derrick Jensen, Ralph Nader, Loretta