The saga of Lisbeth Salander continues, and David Lagercrantz, who has written the sequel to Stieg Larsson’s wildly popular Millennium trilogy, is both proud and deeply anxious over how millions of readers will receive it.
“At night my head burns,” he said, explaining that he had tried to get Larsson’s characters “into my blood system” when writing. Asked about the biggest liberty he took, he laughed a little and said, “Doing it.”
A tall, handsome, slightly twitchy man in a T-shirt and plaid trousers, he acknowledged that “I’m scared to death that I won’t live up to Stieg.” But “I couldn’t resist”, he said. “I would have regretted it my whole life.”
Larsson’s legacy is certainly formidable, even intimidating. After he died in 2004 of a sudden heart attack at 50, his three books, beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, went on to sell some 80 million copies in more than 50 languages.
In 2013, Larsson’s father and brother hired Lagercrantz, a Swedish author of literary fiction and biography, to write a sequel to the trilogy. The result, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, was published in 25 countries on August 26, and its many publishers, including Knopf in the United States, have reason to be bullish.
Already 2.7 million copies have been printed globally, and marketing is in full swing; one German bookshop is offering to give away a Fiat 500 in the Millennium design — the Fiat with the Dragon Tattoo — to a lucky customer. Discussions about another film have begun, and Lagercrantz is preparing for a gruelling five-week author’s tour in Europe and the US.
However, not everyone has welcomed the book, which throws its characters into complicated new conspiracies involving cybercrime and the National Security Agency. Its publication has been particularly traumatic for Larsson’s longtime partner, Eva Gabrielsson, who sees it as a crass manipulation of his legacy for profit. She draws a parallel between Spider’s Web and the controversial publication of Harper Lee’s first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. “I’m quite angry about it,” she said. “I don’t think it’s the right thing to do to a dead author. Sequels never turn out very well, because authors are so constrained; they’re not free to move around in the material.”
Gabrielsson, 61, lived with Larsson for more than 30 years, but because they never married, she had no inheritance rights under Swedish law. She has refused to release the 200 pages or so of an unfinished fourth book that Larsson had on his computer when he died because she did not want another author to complete it.
The trilogy should stand on its own, she said. “I think about the readers. They got to know a fantastic writer who becomes like an old friend. And now they say, ‘Your old friend is gone but we’ll give you a blind date, and be happy’.”
Gabrielsson wrote a book about the struggle over Larsson’s legacy several years ago, and the Larsson heirs have responded with offers of work and money that she has rejected.
At 52, Lagercrantz is two years older than Larsson was when he died. He said he embraced the challenge of creating the sequel when it was proposed by his agent, who once worked at Norstedts, the Swedish publisher of the trilogy. “I’m a strange kind of author — I like assignments,” Lagercrantz said. “I wasn’t clever enough to invent an iconic figure like Salander, but she’s my kind of girl.”
Larsson described the inspiration for Lisbeth Salander, the tough, tattooed computer genius who became his most memorable character, as “Pippi Longstocking” grown up, a woman who lives by her own rules. But Lagercrantz discovered that Stieg and his younger brother, Joakim, now 57, were great readers of comics as children, including Modesty Blaise, a British strip featuring a femme fatale supervillain turned superheroine.
“First we seek our heroes in old myths, and now we seek them in popular culture,” Lagercrantz said. “They told me you have to be at home in Stieg Larsson’s world, but it has to be your book. And after a while, I couldn’t have Stieg Larsson’s ghost hanging over me.” So he delved more deeply into Lisbeth’s childhood and enhanced the character of Lisbeth’s twin, Camilla, who is mentioned only a few times in the previous three books.
One of the first things he did was Google “Wasp”, Lisbeth’s code name, and he discovered the Marvel Comics superheroine of the same name, a founding member of the Avengers who develops superpowers as a child and grows up to avenge her father. Thinking of Wasp as part of Lisbeth’s self-image, he tied it into a deeper exploration of Lisbeth’s childhood with a brutal father and estranged twin sister. In the newest novel, Camilla takes over her father’s criminal empire and modernises it, becoming Lisbeth’s “evil twin” foe.
Mikael Blomkvist, the journalist in Larsson’s trilogy, remains decent and plodding, looking for the next big scoop to save the perennially challenged Millennium magazine. Gabrielsson said that initially Larsson had focused his novel on the journalists there and that Salander was not even a character.
“This became so boring, and something interesting was needed, so Lisbeth arose from need,” she said. “That’s the sign of an author’s imagination.”
Erland and Joakim Larsson, Stieg Larsson’s father and brother, his legal heirs by default, said in an interview that they had never considered having anyone but Lagercrantz write the book, which has received some early positive reviews. Erland, 79, however, did notice it didn’t have much sex, an element that he felt Stieg had overdone. They say they intend to give their share of the royalties to Expo, an investigative magazine co-founded by Larsson in 1995 that was his model for Millennium magazine. “It was always Stieg’s intention that the income from Book Four would go to Expo,” Erland said, adding that he and Joakim had given considerable sums to Expo in the past.
Lagercrantz, meanwhile, remains sensitive to charges that he is profiting from another man’s fame. The Swedish news media has pointed out, as has Gabrielsson, that he and Stieg Larsson are from different worlds — that Lagercrantz is from a noble literary family and lacks the political activism and rage that drove Larsson. Lagercrantz points to torments of his own. “The real demon in my life is my father,” Olof Lagercrantz, a prominent Swedish literary critic and intellectual who died in 2002, he said. “We certainly weren’t discussing bestsellers at home,” he said. “But after a time, I realised I could not be my father, and my life took a turn.”
He did crime reporting for a Swedish tabloid and then turned to biographies and a novel about Alan Turing, the British computer genius and Second World War code-breaker who was convicted of gross indecency and killed himself in 1954. His most highly praised work, I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic, is a novelistic biography depicting the life and upbringing of one of Sweden’s and Europe’s most famous soccer stars, based on reportage but with invented dialogue.
“So I’m still schizophrenic,” Lagercrantz said. “Of course I want to be a bestseller because I’m in the business and I want to be read, but there is no money in the world that can compensate for writing badly.” When I read him a cliché in the English translation of the new novel, about a woman “playing them like a violin”, Lagercrantz looked agonised. “I’d never write a line like that,” he said.
This book, of course, ends with the possibility of a sequel, but the publishers, the Larssons and Lagercrantz are all noncommittal, preferring to await the public’s reaction. “I know I don’t want to be Stieg Larsson my whole life,” Lagercrantz said.
Gabrielsson remains bitter. “They say they are doing this for the readers, and all kinds of nonsense,” she said. “They don’t want to say: ‘We want money. We want fame. We want to walk the red carpet again’.”
Joakim Larsson said that “we were all in shock when Stieg died”, and that throughout years of contention, “we’ve tried to reach out to Eva, to reach an agreement.” All have experienced grief, he said, from the early deaths of Stieg Larsson to those of his mother and of Joakim’s own wife. “We’ve all lost someone,” he said. “I think we should all try to comfort each other.”
–New York Times News Service
