Lily’s Blog

This book is the first of the Millenium trilogy written by Stieg Larsson. The trilogy was part of D’s Christmas present from moi. He has read the three books and enjoyed them.

Sadly, Stieg Larsson died in 2004, aged 50 before the trilogy was published. I read the wikipedia article on him after I had read this book. It gave interesting background information.

I liked the book but almost expected to like it more from all I had heard about it from a number of people who have read it.

There are three main characters; Michael Blomkvist, a journalist, Lisbeth Salander, an angry, young computer hacker, after whom the book is named and Henrik Vanger, a wealthy, Swedish Industrialist.

Forty years earlier, Harriet Vanger, a niece of Henrik’s, disappeared from the family’s island. Nobody could tell what happened to her and no corpse was ever found. Henrik Vanger, now elderly, has been tormented all his life by her loss and is convinced that a family member murdered her.

The journalist Blomkvist has recently lost a libel case concerning his reportage of a financial scandal, and is now ‘lying low’. Vanger commissions him to research this unsolved mystery. Early on, Blomkvitst sees a link with a number of other murders committed around the same time. Blomkvist seeks the assistance of Salander, this genius hacker. Blomkvitst and Salander, though an unlikely pairing, work well together to eventually solve the mystery. The book is somewhat a love story.

I read with interest an article in last Saturday’s Irish Times that the Larsson’s authorship of these books is questioned.

Quoting from the article:

Lately, however, most talk of Larsson’s work in Sweden has centred on public criticism of his reporting methods and his talent as a writer, as well as allegations that his life partner of 32 years could actually have written much of the trilogy … Hellberg, now a journalist for Sweden’s top-selling morning paper, wrote that while Larsson was a masterful researcher … he was an awkward writer who had probably called on his partner, Eva Gabrielsson, to do much of the writing for the trilogy.

This is interesting because Wikipedia’s article on Larsson states:

In May 2008 it was announced that Larsson’s 1977 will, found soon after his death, declared his wish to leave his assets to the Umeå branch of the Communist Workers League (now the Socialist Party). As the will was unwitnessed, it was not valid under Swedish law, with the result that all of Larsson’s estate, including future royalties from book sales, went to his father and brother. His long term partner Eva Gabrielsson, who found the will, has no legal right to the inheritance, sparking controversy between her and his father and brother. The two never married because, under Swedish law, couples entering into marriage are to make their addresses (at the time) publicly available; marrying would have been a security risk. Owing to his reporting on extremist groups and the death threats he had received, the couple had sought and been granted masking of their addresses, personal data and identity numbers from public records, to make it harder for e.g. stalkers to trace them; this kind of “identity cover” was integral to his work as a journalist and would have been difficult to bypass if the two had married or become registered partners.

It further states Gabrielsson claims the author had little contact with his father and brother and requests the rights to control his work so it may be presented in the way he would have wanted.

Ouch!