Free "There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me by Eva Gabrielsson

best eaten cold.
    This dilemma between morality and action is in fact what drives the plot in
The Millennium Trilogy
. Individuals change the world and their fellow human beings for better or for worse, but each of us acts according to his or her own sense of morality, which is why everything comes down in the end to personal responsibility.
    The trilogy allowed Stieg to denounce everyone he loathed for their cowardice, their irresponsibility, and their opportunism: couch-potato activists, sunny-day warriors, fair-weather skippers who pick and choose their causes;false friends who used him to advance their own careers; unscrupulous company heads and shareholders who wangle themselves huge bonuses.… Seen in this light, Stieg couldn’t have had any better therapy for what ailed his soul than writing his novels.

Addresses in
The Millennium Trilogy
     
    IN
THE
Girl Who Played with Fire
, Stieg describes what Erika Berger’s husband, Lars Beckman, has been doing for the previous six months. An art historian and a successful author, Beckman has been “working on a book about the artistic decoration of buildings and its influences, and why people felt a sense of well-being in some buildings but not in others. The book had begun to develop into an attack on functionalism.” With those words Stieg has also summarized the theme of my book on Per Olof Hallman, an architect and urbanist who died in 1941. Stockholm was built on fourteen islands connected by bridges, and Hallman planned residential communities there that accentuated the capital’s distinctive greenery, islet rocks,and culturally distinctive houses offering views of the water. Hallman paid particular attention to the
human habitat
through the integration of green spaces, for example, and playgrounds, or even works of art. For Hallman, the goals of architecture and urbanism were to bring people serenity and joie de vivre, for he felt that the environment in which they lived could either strengthen or stress them.
    I had begun writing my book in 1997 but was obliged to set it aside when the Swedish government hired me to join a study on the feasibility of constructing affordable quality housing. In 2002, however, I decided to become a part-time consultant so that I could concentrate on my research, which involved spending a great deal of time studying documents in libraries, archives, and stores specializing in old books. Every evening, when Stieg came home and dumped his backpack in the hall, he would always call out, “Hey there! Anybody home?” Then he would head straight for the settee where I sat working and ask his other eternal questions: “What did you find out today? Is there any coffee?” He’d settle in next to me, asking lots of questions and listening closely to my replies.
    Since Stieg didn’t have time to read each new version of my book, I discussed the text with him regularly. On Saturdays I’d take him on lengthy walks through the “Hallman zones” I was writing about. As a research shortcut for the trilogy (and to give a little nod to my work), he’d asked me if he could use the places I was showing him so that his characters could live in neighborhoods that matchedtheir personalities. That’s why Dag Svensson and Mia Bergman—an investigative reporter and a grad student—live in the garden village Enskede, at 8B Björneborgsvägen Street, while Cortez, a reporter for
Millennium
, is on bohemian Alhelgonagatan, in Helgalunden, a neighborhood on Södermalm. And when the trilogy opens, Lisbeth Salander’s place is on working-class Lundagatan.
    However, Stieg wanted Mikael Blomkvist’s apartment to be in the oldest part of Södermalm, not in those Hallman zones. We investigated numerous addresses before finding the right one. Bellmansgatan offered several possibilities, one of which was the Laurinska building, at Nos. 4–6. Since its construction in 1891, many artists had lived in this large red-brick apartment house with its