Men who hate women. That’s the ‘real’ title of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and last night I found people that fit the description quite well. Swedish television had a documentary on, about Stieg Larsson and his money and the feud over who inherits.
On the one hand are Stieg’s father and brother, and on the other his partner Eva, who he was with for over thirty years. When asked, the Larsson gentlemen didn’t seem to know when they had last seen their beloved Stieg. The year he died, or maybe the year before. Hard to say. Oh yes, his parents had farmed Stieg out to live with his grandparents for nine years when he was a small boy. So between sending him away and having him back and him leaving home as an adult, there was precious little time for them to get to know him.
But clearly they know him better, and love him better than the woman Stieg lived with. They didn’t think much of Eva. Painted her as mentally unstable, because there are standards to live up to, even when you’ve been bereaved. They both knew this, having lost wives themselves. Larsson junior even suggested that Larsson senior should marry his brother’s partner, to keep ‘things’ in the family. Well that sounds sane.
Eva and Stieg didn’t marry because he was the target of Nazis, and it was easier for him to remain alive and safe by Eva being the owner of the small flat they lived in. And as long as they weren’t married he couldn’t be traced this way. Funny then that the Larsson gents inherited half the flat and offered to turn Eva out of her home unless she handed over the laptop with book four in the Millennium series on.
That laptop, which by now is over five years old, was also avidly sought by Stieg’s former colleague on the magazine he wrote for. They felt they could do with another computer. This despite the Larssons giving them one million kronor of Stieg’s money. That’s one million out of an estimated eighty million.
At this point the television people, who had until then seemed very much on Eva’s side, demanded to see the laptop. She just looked at them and refused.
The brother and the father struck me as anything but literate. But they feel they are the best placed people to look after Stieg’s writing. The spineless publisher agrees.
It almost makes you think that boycotting the books would be the best thing. How could such an intelligent and caring man come from a family like that?
10 responses so far ↓
Seana // July 17, 2009 at 4:38 |
Thank you, Bookwitch. No, I’m going to read them, because he sounds like a man who overcame much. And he deserves that. Might steal them though, if I have to do that to get around what sounds a very cold-hearted family.
Anne Cassidy // July 17, 2009 at 7:57 |
Don’t say boycott!! I’m half way through the second book and it’s brilliant!
bookwitch // July 17, 2009 at 9:28 |
I know, Anne. They are great. I just feel somewhat sick to have added to what those men ‘are storing in a bank account’, when Stieg’s plans for the money were very specific. He wanted to give money to all sorts of worthy causes, and had planned it down to where the money from each book (up to book ten!) was going to go. Not to Daddy.
adele geras // July 17, 2009 at 10:31 |
I too am not going to boycott the books as they’re too good. And what you have described seems like nothing so much as a plot for a really gritty novel full of horrible characters. It’s a really scary scenario and that family…. words fail me. But the books are marvellous.
medinger // July 17, 2009 at 11:08 |
What a horrible story. I will though read the next book (not out in the US yet).
Debi Gliori // July 17, 2009 at 16:37 |
But wasn’t the horrible family precisely the reason the man was such a literary giant? Pricks to kick against sort of thing? In order to survive Larsson found a way to alchemize the base metal of his upbringing into the gold of his books and subsequent life with a woman who truly loved him. Urrrghh – you couldn’t make it up…
Penny Dolan // July 18, 2009 at 10:31 |
Think, like Debi, that the SL books have this huge power over readers because they’re built on the rocks in his life – both the rocks that support and give hand-holds, and the rocks that can dash you to bits. His stories and his story knot the heart.
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