Publisher's Weekly Review
In this candid, moving work, Gabrielsson chronicles her life's journey with her longtime companion, Stieg Larsson, the Swedish creator of the Millennium trilogy who died suddenly at age 50, in 2004, before the first volume of his phenomenally successful work (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in English) was even published. Gabrielsson tells that she had little legal recourse in Sweden to claim his literary and intellectual property even though the childless couple had lived together in Stockholm for 30 years and shared passions for science fiction and political activism; they edited and published their joint antifascist, antiracist newsletter, Expo, begun in the mid-1990s, to combat a wave of extreme right-wing militancy in Sweden. The rights to Larsson's literary trilogy fell posthumously to his father and brother, who shut Gabrielsson out. Gabrielsson writes about their similarities: both came from simple farm people, abandoned as children by their parents to be raised largely by grandparents; they met at a student anti-Vietnam War meeting in 1972 and together moved through leftist movements to find meaningful work, Larsson at the Swedish news agency TT, and Gabrielsson as an architect. Much of their political engagement and feminism is reflected in the Millennium books, the writing of which developed much later in Larsson's career-as Gabrielsson, evidently the person who understood him as few did, warmly, lovingly depicts in this spirited defense of their relationship. (Aug.) Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.
New York Review of Books Review
Eva Gabrielsson recalls her 32-year partnership with the best-selling author of the Millennium trilogy. EVA GABRIELSSON and Stieg Larsson spent 32 years together in Sweden and were soul mates, collaborators and fellow travelers. But one thing they were not was husband and wife, a fact that became critical when Larsson died unexpectedly in 2004 at the age of 50. That Larsson wrote an improbably successful trilogy of novels that began with "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and went on to sell more than 50 million books worldwide complicated every aspect of his passing. Sweden has no "automatic right of inheritance" provision for common-law spouses, so Larsson's brother and father have come to control his lucrative literary estate. Gabrielsson's book, '"There Are Things I Want You to Know' About Stieg Larsson and Me," is an attempt to regain custody of Larsson's legacy, not only from his family but also from a world hungry to commercialize his every aspect, with films both Swedish and American, companion books and journalistic examinations of the "Girl" phenomenon and the man who created it. Famous only in death, Larsson was a fervent feminist, an author of numerous books and articles about right-wing Swedish extremism, and a socialist to his core. As Gabrielsson explains, much of his life's work was embodied in Expo, a small political magazine that struggled to stay afloat. The crime novels were "like therapy," she writes. "He was describing Sweden the way it was and the way he saw the country: the scandals, the oppression of women, the friends he cherished and wished to honor." Fans of his books looking for an intimate peek into the life of a man who summoned a dark, scary version of Sweden will not be disappointed, but that understanding does not come easily. The book is a short, highly emotional tour though a widow's grief and dispossession, and the details of the couple's life together are jarringly juxtaposed with blood feuds and score-settling. That is not to say Gabrielsson is an unreliable narrator - the truth of what she says seems to come off every page - just that she is a very difficult one to follow. She lurches from describing the man she loved to the physical and political milieu they moved through in ways that hint at connections rather than making them. But the danger lurking around every corner in "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and its siblings can be found here as well. Gabrielsson writes that neo-Nazis left death threats on the couple's answering machine and sent bullets in the mail, and suggests that part of the reason the two of them never married was that it would have made Larsson an easier target for his opponents on the right. In the main, the things in "'There Are Things I Want You to Know'" will be of interest to Larsson completists and obsessives - readers who care about details like which coffee shops in the fiction were also part of Larsson's daily life. ("Nowadays I never drink coffee at home by myself," Gabrielsson notes ruefully. "I've switched to tea.") People with an adjacency to fame often try to glom onto a piece of it, but Gabrielsson is up to something more ambitious and personal. To everyone else, Larsson came out of nowhere, but she knows better and suggests that the Millennium trilogy is of a piece with the rest of his life. While the novels observe some conventions of the crime genre - mysteries are fashioned, and head feints keep readers on their toes - as a whole they often break with custom. In particular, women, who often serve as mere accessories in fictions pivoting around conspiracy and crime, were fully drawn by Larsson, whether victims or perpetrators. Lisbeth Salander, damaged and secretive, emerges as a bisexual, punk-rock Pippi Longstocking who exacts revenge with precision and alacrity. She's a sexy, vengeful archangel who refuses to be objectified or owned. Mikael Blomkvist, the other hero of the trilogy, is the crusading journalist who fights under onerous circumstances to find the truth. To her credit, Gabrielsson makes it clear that Larsson was no Blomkvist. One of the more remarkable aspects of her odd, idiosyncratic book is that she goes to some length to show how different Larsson was from his literary confection. Yes, he was a dedicated journalist, a self-defined feminist and a man who believed that corporate self-dealing tore at the social contract - he was also, as Gabrielsson points out, "constantly drinking coffee, smoking and working like a fiend, but the resemblance basically stops there." Gabrielsson describes how as a boy, Larsson was shipped off to his grandparents, in the northern hinterlands of Sweden, and grew up in a basic cabin that lacked electricity or heat but was full of human warmth. After his grandfather died, Larsson ended up in a far more urban environment that he liked far less. A child who found a place to stand in the remote, arduous reaches of the wilderness, he never bought into the modern notion that there was something intrinsically wonderful about capitalism. He met Gabrielsson at a young age and they bonded over radical causes, including a visceral opposition to the United States' intervention in Vietnam. Larsson went on to prosecute leftist causes through his stories in Searchlight, a progressive journal published in England, and by forming Expo, an on-again, off-again magazine intent on holding neo-Nazis and their ilk to account. As depicted in '"There Are Things I Want You to Know,'" Larsson was a frustrated journalist who was told, over and over, that he could not write. As a 20-year employee at the Swedish news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyra, or T.T., where he worked mostly as a designer, he played an important role in revealing the insidious neoNazi movement in Sweden, but he was rarely allowed to step up to the keyboard and write what he knew. From where Gabrielsson sat, often right next to Larsson, the Millennium trilogy allowed him to express a worldview he was never able to elucidate as a journalist. She diagrams, with a great deal of specificity, how the fundamental narratives of his three books were essentially fictionalized portraits of the Sweden few people knew, a place where latent white supremacy found expression in all aspects of contemporary life, and antiextremists lived in persistent fear of attack. "Everything of this nature described in the Millennium trilogy has happened at one time or another to a Swedish citizen, journalist, politician, public prosecutor, unionist or policeman," she writes. "Nothing was made up." Nothing, apparently, was forgiven, either. Although Larsson comes off as a kind, if somewhat distracted, partner, Gabrielsson makes it clear that he, like Lisbeth Salander, "never forgave ... an affront, and made no bones about it." Finally and relentlessly, she pushes back against family members, against the media, against all those who perpetuate the "myth" of "Millennium Stieg" - "people who barely knew him, knew nothing of our life, and shared none of our struggles" - perhaps heeding the words Larsson once said to her: "To exact revenge for yourself or your friends is not only a right, it's an absolute duty." Gabrielsson is attempting to regain custody of Stieg Larsson's legacy from a world hungry to commercialize him. David Carr, the author of the memoir "The Night of the Gun," is a culture reporter at The Times and writes the paper's Media Equation column.
