Radical Author of Best-Selling Mysteries: Stieg Larsson’s Activist Days
Posted by Mike E on January 12, 2011
Lizbeth Salander -- central character of Larsson's Millenium trilogy
I regret that Kasama has not yet featured a review of the Millenium trilogy by Stieg Larsson — starting with the book/movie Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
It is not every day that a radical anti-fa activist writes a series of mystery novels that grab a world audience — and portrays the dark underbelly of Swedish social-democratic society in ways that keep you turning the pages. (I loved hearing Glenn Beck whine that his stupid novel was kept off the top of the bestseller list by “those books by that Swedish communist.”)
I’m a fan of the books and movies — and of Lizbeth Salander, a character so compelling that it is hard to believe she is fictional. Once I had started those books i could not put them down — and a few times found myself reading through the night because I was unable to set them aside in the middle of the action. Like millions of people, I am sad that Stieg died too young — before getting a chance to build on this first work and connect more with his world-wide audience.
There is much to say about these books… but let’s open the story by focusing on the author for a second.
This piece appeared first in the British Tribune Magazine.
How Stieg Larsson trained Marxist guerrillas in Eritrea
The Millennium Trilogy: Boxed Set by Stieg Larsson
MacLehose Press, £69.99
Stieg Larsson, the anti-fascist journalist who became a bestselling author – and worldwide publishing phenomenon – with the posthumous success of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, spent a year in the horn of Africa with the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, a Marxist group fighting for independence from Ethiopia, training a company of female guerrillas in the use of grenade launchers.
Stieg Larsson
This dramatic revelation comes in a new book called Afterword, subtitled Stieg Larsson: Four Essays and an Exchange of e-mails, accompanying his three Lisbeth Salander novels – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest – in a lavish new cloth-bound boxed set from his British publishers MacLehose.
That Larsson was a left-wing activist is well known. He worked tirelessly all his life in the fight against fascism in northern Europe, and a cursory reading of his books would make his political leanings clear. But most critics, commentators and readers have assumed he was soft left in a typically Swedish sort of way. No one knew, at least here in Britain, that he was a radical and revolutionary who, at one point, joined the armed struggle in Africa.
It was an article here in Tribune in October last year which first revealed that Karl Stig-Erland Larsson was a young activist with the Communist Workers League and edited the Trotskyist journal Fjärde Internationalen before joining the news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå. He helped start Stop the Racism in the 1980s and, after eight people were killed by neo-Nazis in 1995, the Expofoundation, dedicated to exposing fascists in Scandinavia. He became editor-in-chief of Expo in 1999 and contributed for many years to Searchlight here in Britain. Shortly before he died from a sudden heart attack in 2004 at the age of 50 – there were suggestions that he was murdered by the extreme right; more likely it was the result of stress, overwork and the 60 hand-rolled cigarettes he smoked each day – he finished the Millennium trilogy which would make him famous.
Now John-Henri Holmberg, a close friend for 30 years who shared Larsson’s love of science fiction, has spilled the beans on his political past. Holmberg explains how, in 1968, at the age of 14, Larsson joined “the countrywide anti-Vietnam War protest organization, where at 18 he met fellow student Eva Gabrielsson, who became his life partner. In Umeå Stieg had also become active in the Trotskyite Communist Workers League and wrote regularly for their magazine Internationalen. Why the very small Trotskyite group? Stieg was an individualist. His family background was more traditionally leftist. His maternal grandfather, with whom Stieg grew up, was an old school Communist devoted to the Soviet Union, while Stieg’s parents belonged to the ruling Social Democrat party in Sweden.
“Stieg rejected both these alternatives – he viewed the USSR as a repressive totalitarian dictatorship and the Social Democrats as unprincipled and closely allied with capitalist interests. The Trotskyites, perhaps the most romantically utopian of any of the communist groups, were less intolerant in their cultural views than others, which generally viewed only socialist realism as acceptable and heaped scorn on both science fiction
and crime fiction. They also, as had Trotsky himself, stood by the dream of an egalitarian anarchist and borderless world as the final goal, and this certainly spoke to Stieg’s own individualism as well as imagination. During his military service at the infantry regiment in Umeå, in 1975 and 1976, Stieg was one of those smuggling the underground Trotskyite magazine Röd Soldat [Red Soldier] into the barracks.
“1977 was a dramatic year. Stieg spent part of it in Eritrea, where he had contacts in the Marxist EPLF liberation movement and helped to train a company of women guerrillas in the use of grenade launchers. But he also contracted a kidney inflammation and was forced to leave the country.”
This contrasts markedly with an email, also published in Afterword, from Larsson to Eva Gedin, his editor at the Swedish publishing house Norstedts. When she asked him for biographical material, for the book jacket and to help sell the foreign rights to his books, he replied: “Hmm, my biography… I started researching right-wing extremism in the 1970s, and I suppose I have gone on doing that for more than 30 years. Since the early 1980s I have been the Sweden correspondent for the English journal Searchlight, which is the world’s biggest and most prestigious anti-racist journal, and I was one of the founders of Expo in 1995. I have been working full time for Expo since 1999. I have written books including Extremhögern [The Extreme Right] with Anna-Lena Lodenius; Sverigedemokraterna: Den Nationella Rörelsen [Sweden Democrats: The Nationalist Movement] with Mikael Ekman; and Överleva Deadline: Handbok för Mordhotade Journalister [Surviving the Deadlines: A Handbook for Threatened Journalists] for the National Union of Journalists. Perhaps it would be easier simply to say I worked for TT for 20 years. Anything else? I don’t really know.” When she pressed him he reluctantly replied: “Living with a partner. No children. Grew up in Norsjö and Umeå. Living in Stockholm since 1977.”
But, in an interesting aside, writing to Eva about the first chapter of his second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, which opens with Lisbeth Salander in Grenada, he admits: “I have been thinking a bit about the introduction and the tornado that devastated Grenada. We have resurrected the Grenada Committee here in Sweden as a result of the hurricane, so I will be able to consult the Consul. I was involved in the revolution in Grenada in the 1980s, and was a good friend of the murdered Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. But that’s another story.”
Bishop, head of the Marxist New Jewel Movement, became Prime Minister of the People’s Revolutionary Government when he deposed Sir Eric Gairy in 1979. Bishop forged close links with Cuba and signed an arms deal with the Soviet Union in 1982. A year later, on October 19 1983, Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard and General Hudson Austin put him under house arrest. Demonstrators in the capital, St George’s, managed to free Bishop but soldiers stormed Fort Rupert, lined him and several of his supporters up against a wall, and shot them dead. Six days later 6,000 US marines invaded the island on the orders of President Ronald Reagan – an action which provoked a storm of international criticism.
Holmberg says Larsson was tolerant of other people’s views “and could even regard his own choice of affiliation with humour. Stieg was a card-carrying Trotskyite, I an individualist libertarian. I asked him if he could define, very simply, what he felt made his particular group different from all the then many other communist groups. ‘I think the big difference,’ he said, ‘is that when all the others are out fighting you right-wingers in the streets, we are the ones who will still be sitting in our basement, trying to decide whether this is really the right historical moment’.”
Although Afterword is only 85 pages long, there is much to fascinate anyone who has read and enjoyed the Millennium trilogy. Larsson’s preferred title for both the first book and the series was Men Who Hate Women but publishers thought that would kill the books stone dead. According to his typescripts, Larsson wanted the second book to be called The Witch Who Dreamt of a Can of Petrol and Matches and the third The Exploding Castle in the Air, a reference to Sweden’s welfare state. Holmberg writes: “When eventually the books were published Stieg was dead and the titles had been changed. The series became, not very aptly, Millennium [the name of the investigative magazine for which Larsson’s alter ego, the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, works]. At least in Swedish Stieg’s series title was kept as the subtitle for the first volume; in the English translation it was thrown out altogether and the book was called The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I suspect that he would have objected in no uncertain terms.”
Contrarian said
It is worth noting, in terms of accessibility, that the film versions of the first two books in the trilogy are currently available from Netflix, both in the format of a DVD mailed to you and in the form of an instant screaming video to your computer. The film version of the third book will be available as of January 25th on Netflix solely in the form of a streamed video, with no announced date yet for when the mailed DVD will be available. Total watching time of all three movies is about seven hours. The third film, which I have not yet seen, is reportedly much less consistent with the book than the first and second films are.
We need to write some contemporary revolutionary U.S. fiction!
Contrarian said
sorry, that should have read “streaming” video, not “screaming”! :)
Mike E said
I think the third movie is, as you said, much less consistent with the book. And (of the three books) the third is the one that deals most with the Swedish state (and the movie is not just consistent but specifically simplifies the plot in ways that makes the Swedish police and state seem less sinister.)
orinda said
I loved the books, the movies not so much. It intrigued me that a series about a very angry young woman became so popular. Salander’s power was not physical strength or martial arts prowess, but her deep rage against men who hurt women. She was like a hornet’s nest herself, provoke her and you’d be sorry.
I also found really intriguing the exposure of Swedish hypocrisy on human rights.
Nelson H. said
My partner and I just watched The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Having not yet read the books (instant Netflix seemed more enticing that a trip to the bookstore, cheaper too) I was really unprepared for the intense scenes of sexual violence. I feel like this is a point where we really need to offer cautionary warnings as part of our revolutionary feminist politics.
Mike E said
Nelson:
The name of this book (in swedish) is “Men Who Hate Women.” It is about a thriller that rips into gentile and normalized misogyny in society.
I’m not sure what “cautionary warnings” means to you (perhaps “parental advisory, rated R” is what you have in mind?)
But I think we should tell people: a great book has been written about the abuse of women.
Let the reactionaries be cautionary. I think we should be enthusiastic.
Nelson H. said
Hey Mike, I totally get that. I was blown away by the movie, plan to pick the book up at the library and agree wholeheartedly that we should be enthusiastic about it. But I also think that extremely graphic depictions of rape violence aren’t something we can be flippant about. I don’t mean a “parental advisory,” or restating the MPAA rating. (In this instance the MPAA rating reads “May include adult themes, adult activity, hard language, intense or persistent violence, sexually-oriented nudity, drug abuse or other elements,” which isn’t anything like “expect multiple scenes that graphically portray rape.)
I also think that folks who do survivor support work have shared valuable lessons that we have to be very purposeful in how we treat visual depictions of sexual violence, and that even films, books and art that aim to undermine the abuse of women can deeply impact the very survivors of such forms of abuse in unforeseen ways.
Ultimately, my point was one concerning what our culture should be, how we as revolutionaries must deal with such things. So to be clear, when I say cautionary warning I think that means we have to mention when films and novels we recommend include graphic scenes of rape violence. Whether this is appropriate for this specific lead article I’m less clear on, but I was making a point on the comment side of things so if other folks reading these here comments decide to queue it up on the Netflix like we did they might be prepared.
epoliticus said
There is also a nice biographical essay of the author in the Spring 2010 issue of Scandinavian Review. I don’t know if S.R. is available online — a friend has lent me the hard-copy.
Stephanie McMillan said
I loved the books, haven’t seen the movies yet. Larsson created great characters and the novels kept me up many nights way past my bedtime.
I second Nelson — it’s always good to warn people about rape scenes, for those who have been traumatized.
Maz said
Just working through the series now. One thing that strikes me the most is the remarkable morality of the protagonists that Larsson has created. It’s basically the antithesis of a dog-eat-dog world. In the novels, it’s perfectly normal for someone to drop everything and storm, unarmed, into a hideout of ultra-violent gangsters and risk death to come to the aid of a friend that they haven’t seen for a couple of years. Characters routinely go to the line for one another in without hesitation, it’s as if their default setting is a courageous human solidarity.
This solidarity threads together the story as it progresses, and it’s really the only thing that enable anyone to struggle against any of the dirtbags – there are heroes, but they’re also basically normal (well, except Lisbeth, hehe) and flawed, and most importantly, they all need each other.