From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Thu Jul 01 2010 - 08:22:17 EDT
"He had no family, and none of his friends came to his sickbed. His last
contact with life was an Eritrean night nurse by the name of Sara Kitama,
who kept watch at his bedside and held his hand as he died"
>From The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest by Stieg Larsson
"At 17, he [Stieg Larsson] hitchhiked to Algeria, and after 14 months of
national service in the army, then still mandatory in Sweden, he went to
Ethiopia, where he aided Eritrean rebels"
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23Larsson-t.html?pagewanted=3
"After his (somewhat surprising) enthusiastically undertaken military
service and wide travels in Africa, where he witnessed bloody civil war in
Eritrea, Larsson decided to devote his life to fighting fascism along with
religious and racial intolerance"
Times, UK
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/fiction/article7113874.ece
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http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/movies/bs-ae-film-sragow-0702-20100701,0,7899885.story
The man behind 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo'
Charles runs free documentary on novelist Stieg Larsson
By Michael Sragow, The Baltimore Sun
July 1, 2010
This film made me remember the time I spent as a kid hanging out at a mall
paperback book store (a phenomenon then as new as the iPad), picking apart
iconoclastic novels like Richard Condon's "The Manchurian Candidate" with
the erudite proprietor. I like to think that Larsson's idiosyncratic blends
of conspiracy and crime thriller connect with a similar thirst in today's
readers for authenticity and originality.
As for the movie versions: You can't merely chalk up the art-house success
of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" to the fame and popularity of the
novel. Global best-sellers and Nobel Prize winners alike have come a cropper
at the cinematheque. Think Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of
Cholera" or every James Ivory movie since "The Remains of the Day." Yet in
an era when subtitled hits have become increasingly rare in America, "The
Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" has netted close to $9 million in the United
States alone. It hasn't stopped playing at the Charles since it opened in
April, and it will probably continue when "The Girl Who Played With Fire"
arrives July 16.
"Millennium: The Story" mostly credits the performers for the film series'
international success because the actors match or transcend readers' visions
of Larsson's characters. Newcomer Noomi Rapace does rise to the occasion
with a quintessential Riot-grrrl performance as Lisbeth Salander, Larsson's
super-hacker, bisexual Goth heroine. Michael Nyqvist matches her with a
lived-in interpretation of Larsson's fantasy alter ego, the middle-age
investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who is wary, persistent and sexy
in his well-worn way. These two share a chemistry that goes beyond a
warlock's brew of sensational ingredients. They're not as opposite as they
appear to be. They're fiercely skeptical of all mainstream facades. They're
unconventional to their bones.
But in America, also credit Chicago's Music Box Films, a company that
recently came to prominence when it nursed a twisty French thriller called
"Tell No One," market by market, to stunning box office and critical
success. This distributor has learned how to treat tough material with
tender care. Encouraging exhibitors to show "Millennium: The Story" is part
of that strategy.
To mix metaphors as ruthlessly as Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson mixed
politics, sexual atrocities and intrigue: How does a grass-roots literary
and film cult spread like wildfire — without burning itself out? That's the
question publishing and movie companies have asked about the scorching sales
of the novels known in English as "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," "The
Girl Who Played With Fire" and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest."
Part of the answer lies in "Millennium: The Story," a 52-minute French
documentary about Larsson's creation of gripping, labyrinthine thrillers. A
rough-hewn, oddly charming film, it plays free at the Charles at 7 p.m.
Monday and July 12.
"Millennium: The Story" is a promotional tool that's also genuine. With its
serious-minded narrator speaking semi-broken English — I'm not sure whether
he calls Swedish fascism "Latin Nazism" or "latent Nazism" (probably the
latter) — this film is heartening in several ways. It portrays readers
walking the streets of Stockholm to see locations referenced in the books
and to absorb what Larsson loved and hated about Sweden before he died of a
coronary thrombosis at age 50, nine months before his first novel's
publication.
The documentary depicts Larsson as a fearless journalist and fiction writer
who believed you couldn't "wear a mask" when fighting racism, anti-Semitism
and violence against women. (He didn't marry his mate of over 30 years, Eva
Gabrielsson, for security reasons. Unfortunately, that decision left her
without legal standing after he died so young, without a will; his estate
went to his younger brother and father.)
Above all, "Millennium" briskly lays out the shroud-to-riches story of a
provincial lad who always wanted to be a writer. Although for his first nine
years he lived with his maternal grandparents without hot water or
electricity in Sweden's Far North (we're told they all slept in the same
bed), Larsson was a well-adjusted kid as well as a left-wing activist from
youth. (His maternal grandfather was a Communist; his father can barely get
out the word when he calls Stieg a "Trotskyist.")
Larsson traveled around the globe, with stops at Eritrea and Granada, before
settling into Stockholm with Gabrielsson, an architect. He devoted himself
to combating neo-Nazism and all social and domestic violence and corruption
through the Expo Foundation and its antifascist quarterly Expo. Even if
you've read the profiles in Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine and
Entertainment Weekly, it's invaluable to see and hear Larsson's brother and
father, to sample the frigid, austere clime of his youth, and to enter the
spare offices of Expo. Larsson was an honest character and writer. Every now
and then, that's precisely what book readers and moviegoers want: the real
thing.
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