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

“Söder” is also linked by bridges to big Kungsholmen to the northwest, little Reimersholme to the west—in fact to a whole ring of islands large and small. Inthe seventeenth century, rich people began building summer homes in rural, agricultural Södermalm, and working-class housing was built, such as the red cottages still seen today in the northeast of the island. Urbanization proceeded apace in the twentieth century, but as often happens, the by now largely working-class district eventually became home to students, bohemians, and creative souls of all types, and Södermalm currently offers many cultural (and countercultural) amenities. True to form, gentrification brought a new cachet to Söder—and Lisbeth Salander to her apartment at 9 Fiskargatan, thanks to that article in my files.
    My documentation also inspired the Skanska stock-options affair at the beginning of
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
and the pension scandal at ABB, which Mikael Blomkvist and Robert Lindberg discuss when they meet on the wharf on Arholma, the northernmost island in the Stockholm archipelago. It’s after this unfortunate conversation that Blomkvist begins investigating Wennerström and winds up convicted of defamation.
    Stieg and I knew all of the cafés that appear in
The Millennium Trilogy
. We used to meet in some of them after work, as we did at the Kafé Anna in Kungsholmen, where Blomkvist hears on the radio that Wennerström has won his libel case. We liked to visit other cafés on the spur of the moment, like the Giffy and the Java on one of Södermalm’s main streets, Hornsgatan, perhaps after one of our art gallery expeditions on the Hornsgatan “hill.”
Expo
’s informal headquarters were the Kaffebar rightdownstairs in the same building, where Blomkvist learns—again, on the radio—that the man who tried to murder Lisbeth has himself been murdered. The Kaffebar still serves a marvelous little sandwich made with cheese from Västerbotten County, where Stieg and I grew up. We’d have one of those with our caffe lattes after a visit to our favorite bookstore, a treasure trove of old volumes and books on feminism, politics, and so forth. Kvarnen (“The Mill”) is a bustling, noisy restaurant where Lisbeth Salander meets her women friends in the hard rock group Evil Fingers. Kvarnen served delicious meatballs that disappeared at one point from the menu, but the restaurant regulars protested until the owner reinstated these favorites.
    Finally, among the many places in the trilogy that belonged to Stieg and me, one I particularly cherish is the little cabin at Sandhamn (“Sand Harbor”) where Mikael Blomkvist goes “to read, write, and relax.” Every summer we would rent one of these wooden cottages out in the archipelago. Our dream was to build one just for ourselves, and we wanted it to resemble the one described by Lisbeth Salander: about 325 square feet arranged like a boat’s cabin, with a large window looking out over the water and a big kitchen table where both of us could write.

The Characters
     
    IN
THE
Millennium Trilogy
some real people appear, so to speak, under their own names, because Stieg wanted to honor them in this way. Other people provided real-life details that inspired Stieg when he created his fictional characters out of this and that. And some readers simply think they recognize real people—even themselves—in characters who are wholly imaginary. A plastic surgeon wrote me, for example, that he was convinced he’d been the model for the doctor who enlarges Lisbeth Salander’s breasts in
The Girl Who Played with Fire!

     
    MIKAEL BLOMKVIST is not Stieg Larsson. Like Stieg, he’s constantly drinking coffee, smoking, and working like a fiend, but the resemblance basically stops there. On the other hand, though, Blomkvist does clearly embody the figure of the celebrated all-around journalist Stieg would have liked to be, and this character is a spokesperson for many of Stieg’s